Re: Installing Debian on Chuwi Hi12 Tablet

On Mon, 29 Jan 2018 20:08:05 +0100
Michael Lange <klappnase@freenet.de> wrote :

>I don't know if the Debian Live system will handle the 32bit uefi issue
> properly when installing, but this can , if necessary be fixed later.
> I had the same problem with a similar machine. Of course I could remove
> windows completely.
> I am not sure if the installer's auto-partitioning works properly, I used
> the manual partitioning. You must make sure that you have a small (I
> think 100 MB or so is sufficient) FAT partition with the "Boot" flag set,
> which will be mounted to /boot/efi . The rest of the disk can be used
> as usual for "/" and swap.
> If the installer actually fails to install the proper 32bit-efi-grub, that
> does not mean that your device is bricked. This can be easyly fixed by
> booting a live system again, doing a chroot into the installed system and
> install the required grub packages manually (that's what I had to do ;)

Michael thanks for your guidance. I eventually got around to installing Debian Buster as I thought it was most likely to have my wifi driver (and it did), so the install was much easier.

I guess the installer is continually evolving so things change fairly quickly. The 32 bit uefi question never cropped up so I believe the installer is just set to handle that without raising it.

I chose guided partitioning of the whole disk and it gave me 1mb free space + a 500+ mb EPT? partition + the bulk of the electronic drive for / + some swap space 4mb? + another 1 mb of free space. Pressed go and held my breath. It worked.

At the point of installing grub there was a slightly scary message to the effect that on some hardware the uefi setups cannot be guaranteed to handle grub properly so recommending installing grub to a separate partition as that was almost certain to work and letting me choose which option. Chose the separate partition and ended up with a successful install.

Thanks again for your help.

Now when I boot up the device I get 10 seconds of Android loading graphics before it kicks into Debian. Android was removed months ago. Now if you can give me some guidance as to how to remove the annoying Android graphics ..............