Bug#733706: installation-report: installation on a Lenovo Thinkpad E431
Hi,
On 31.12.2013 16:23, Luca Capello wrote:
On Tue, 31 Dec 2013 15:50:39 +0100, Antoine Beaupré wrote:
On 2013-12-31 05:45:01, Andreas Cadhalpun wrote:
Installing on UEFI firmware is supported, but is a little bit tricky,
see for example [1]. Particularly you need a GPT partitioned hard disk
with two additional partitions, one EFI partition marked with the
'boot' flag in gparted and a partition for grub marked as 'bios_grub' in
gparted.
Wrong, with UEFI you do not need any 'bios_grub' partition at all:
<http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=691046#36>
That's correct. The additional 'bios_grub' partition is only needed, if
one wants to be able to boot with both EFI and legacy BIOS.
This is probably not intended in most cases.
On 31.12.2013 16:37, Antoine Beaupré wrote:
On 2013-12-31 10:23:18, Luca Capello wrote:
On Tue, 31 Dec 2013 15:50:39 +0100, Antoine Beaupré wrote:
On 2013-12-31 05:45:01, Andreas Cadhalpun wrote:
Yeah... I struggled with that before, and I *was* able to make it work,
but since it wasn't obvious this was necessary *during* theinstaller,
I did a normal MBR-based partitionning. When the boot loader failed to
install, I didn't want to go back and redo everything, especially since
this is a dual-boot system and I was happy to have been able to resize
the NTFS partition at all... ;)
Sorry, but there is something strange here. In the first email you
reported that "when I rebooted, grub was not installed in the MBR and I
was brought back into windows", which means that partman used the
partition table already present. This can be checked with a simple
`fdisk -l /dev/sda`: if there is no GPT mention, then the partition
table is plain old MBR.
BTW, Windows 7 does not mandate GPT nor UEFI, but can use both.
Oh right - I used the original partitionning I guess. I assumed it was
MBR.
If it is MBR, UEFI installation is not possible without deleting the
existing files on the disk and creating a new GPT partition table. But
with MBR one still can use the legacy BIOS mode, as you did.
Shouldn't we create GPT partitions all the time now anyways?
Why? IMHO if there is no need for it (because BIOS is used) plain old
MBR is easier.
The reason is that it will fail on newer BIOS, from what I can tell.
But GPT is not supported by most old hardware still out there.
Personally, I haven't yet come across a BIOS that doesn't support MBR.
On 31.12.2013 15:50, Antoine Beaupré wrote:
(That resize, btw, was quite scary - I am not sure I did it right. First
off it was very fast, so I suspect only the boundaries of the filesystem
were changed, without telling NTFS. Then when we rebooted into Windows
7, it did a disk check which thankfully worked fine and it seems the
Windows install is okay. But I can't think of doing this on an older
system - it would have probably destroyed data, which is not clearly
stated in partman.
The resize usually is relatively fast, if the part you are removing from
the filesystem does not contain any data, because then no data has to be
moved and only the file system has to be updated to the new size. I
think chkdsk is always scheduled after a resize of NTFS, just to be on
the safe side.
This should also work perfectly fine on an older system, but there it
might take considerably longer, since the data is more likely to be
distributed over the whole partition.
Of course, one should always have backups of important data.
Last but not least, you have to select the UEFI:USB in the firmware
and not BIOS:USB, which every firmware has a different marking scheme
for, but disabling legacy-bios (or equivalent option) in the UEFI
BIOS, should always disable the BIOS:USB option. (It can be enabled
again after installation.)
Right, I guess this is the tricky bit. It seems that in any case, the
user needs to go fiddle in the BIOS, which is annoying. In my case, I
was able to install by *disabling* UEFI in the BIOS, but the reverse
might be the case for others.
Normally, it should not be necessary to change BIOS settings, one just
has to select the correct boot device, which is not always easy.
Either the BIOS should be in legacy mode, or the hard drive should be
partitioned as GPT, when it is an UEFI system. Both cases are supported
out of the box by the Debian installer. But if the disk is partitioned
as MBR and the BIOS in UEFI mode, this inconsistency has to be solved
manually.
> The next missing thing was wifi. I tried installing firmware-linux-
> nonfree, but that wasn't enough - firmware-iwlwifi was the one that
> was required.
The installer should install the correct firmware, if you have (on some
partition accessible during installation) a /firmware folder that
contains the unpacked firmware bundle, which can be downloaded from [2].
But this is currently broken, see [3].
Understood. The weird thing is that the live image did find the wifi
card without a problem, but it wasn't found after the install was done.
Did you have a /firmware folder around? As you installed wheezy, this
should have worked, because it is only broken in jessie/sid.
Oh, and I forgot to mention that I had to remove this block for
Network-Manager to properly pickup the wired interface:
auto eth0
iface eth0 inet dhcp
Otherwise it would say wired: not managed, which is strange to me...
This is bug #724928 [1], which was fixed in the Wheezy 7.2 installer.
> I also had to go in the gnome control center to make sure the touch
> pad works as expected.
What exactly did you have to do in the gnome control center?
I went into "Mouse and Touchpad", clicked on the "Touchpad" tab, and
enabled "touch to click" and two fingers scrolling. (I type this from
memory, from my desktop where I don't have a touch pad. ;)
What do you mean by 'works as expected'?
My user was expecting the "touch to click" to work out of the box, and
we were worried this wasn't supported, and in fact it wasn't until gnome
was installed (XFCE failed to configure it properly).
This is especially annoying on this laptop because the buttons are
completely part of the touchpad construction, so it's actually difficult
to "click" without moving the mouse slightly.
These seem to be bugs in xfce4 and gnome respectively. You should report
them there. It seems more users prefer this (see [2]) and I also do.
That being said, I think it really might be a good idea to install
plymouth by default, as 'novices' generally prefer it, and anyone who
wants to see the boot messages should have sufficient knowledge to
remove it.
I totally agree with that. One thing I noticed with plymouth is that
even when you install it, it doesn't properly configure grub, you still
have to go around the grub config and (*gasp*) edit a weird
configuration file! ;)
I would have expected the plymouth postinst to configure grub
automagically. :) But then that's more an issue with plymouth itself
than the installer.
You could report this as a bug in plymouth, but it is probably not
trivial to fix, because which configuration file has to be changed,
depends on which boot loader is used. Actually I'm not even sure it is
possible, because the boot loader may be installed after plymouth (as
the installer does), or it might be changed after plymouth is installed.
And anyways, those are probably things to keep in mind for Jessie more
than Wheezy...
Except for the already fixed issue, I agree.
Best regards,
Andreas
1: http://bugs.debian.org/724928
2: http://bugs.debian.org/704732
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