success with Jessie 8.1.0 + Xfce on an early Lenovo S205 Ideapad
Using the official Debian 8.1.0-amd64-netinst image dated 20150606-14:16
copied to a usb flash stick, I today installed Debian Jessie with Xfce
desktop to an early Lenovo S205 Ideapad which utilizes UEFI.
The installation boots successfully from the hard drive, and appears to
run properly. However, there is a problem with shutdown.
When the SHUTDOWN button on the Xfce desktop is clicked, the screen goes
dark and the machine appears to be shutting down, but it remains powered
up until the hardware POWER button is pressed.
None of numerous previous attempts to install Debian on this machine was
successful. The last attempt was with an earlier version of the Jessie
netinst image. On that installation I did not try installing GRUB to the
removable media path.
However, in seaching to see whether others have been successful installing
Jessie on the Asus EeePC, I ran across several articles regarding problems
Debian and Ubuntu users have encountered with UEFI on 64-bit and 32-bit
systems, together with much discussion of how to circumvent those
problems. See, for example, https://wiki.debian.org/UEFI.
I had no assurance that the current Debian installer of Jessie would work,
but the discussions which I read indicated that progress had been made
since the release of Wheezy, and that encouraged me to try again.
When I purchased the S205, I was oblivious with respect to the fact that
it had UEFI BIOS. I wiped the hard drive, confident that Debian would
install without difficulty. And wiping the drive destroyed the
restoration copy of Windows.
A couple of years later I learned that Lenovo was selling a new verision
of the S205, with a different BIOS. If I recall correctly, no upgrade was
possible. And the price of a Windows CD was higher than I was willing to
pay.
But, thanks to the Debian installer team, I now have use of a machine
which has been idle now for several years.
Russ
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