How to install Ubuntu on miix 320

Question

I have the new Lenovo miix 320 tablet hybrid. I tried to install Ubuntu 17.04 and got a glitch screen with full of lines or black screen. I tried nomodeset but still didn't work.

How do I fix this?

Answer 1

Ubuntu 18.04 worked. I tried multiple things, so the following list might not be full, but I will update it later after I make a backup.

Warning: Ubuntu 18.04 have not been released yet, so it can be considered unstable. In the meantime daily build is available.

1. Burn the ubuntu ISO to USB stick (I use unetbootin, crossplatform and works like a charm)
2. Switch off the secure mode in BIOS (to enter BIOS, hit F2 when the lenovo logo shows up)
3. Access UEFI boot menu (F12 when lenovo logo shows up) and select the USB stick.
4. Select Try Ubuntu and hit "E" to edit menuentry. Find the line that starts with "linux" and add "nomodeset" to the end of the line. CTRL-X to continue boot.

The screen rotation may not be correct and the console output does not look readable. But it does boot up. After boot up the screen will be in portrait mode. You can change the screen rotation in "Displays" settings menu. Installing Ubuntu works just fine.

Black screen after boot

After some attempts to boot the screen was black. But after fifth or sixth try it showed the desktop. Later I found out that the system really boots up, just close and open the lid and/or hit some buttons - it will eventually liven up.

Known issues

• SD card slot is not working (this might be fixed in future updates)
• Wi-Fi tends to break often. Turned out it's a problem of wifi power management. I managed to find the solution, but don't remember where I've found it. I will update on this later.
• No battery charge indicator. As a temporary workaround, I noticed that when the battery is low the screen starts flickering.

Answer 2

I have the same miix, it’s a problem with UEFI and the internal SSD, BIOS cannot be configurated to AHCI mode (Tales of Lenovo...). So you can boot a live session, install all the firmware and use it with Ubuntu or Debian (I try successfully Debian testing including firmware image and Ubuntu MATE, and it may work whit any distro that use kernel >=4.10), but you cannot install Linux in the internal storage. My next step: try to install Debian in SD card and make something with boot priority, but I don’t know what yet (no options in BIOS...).

Short: You cannot install Linux yet, but you can use Linux from SD card in the meantime before Lenovo fixes the problem.

Long: As I could see in my experience, you will have several problems to configure touchscreen (you can get the graphics on and working, you will have to make an init configuration to get the correct screen orientation, and more to sync your touchs possitions with the mouse possition in the screen, and more if you want autorotation screen and a good configuration of acelerometer), sometimes I had problems with wifi (that tourn off by itself), and I think that it´s not possible to manage the disk (you can mount, umount, read and write, but dont try to resize or make other partitions in internal ssd, you could break all the partition table).

If anyone is thinking about it, I try to resize windows partition to get free space, I made an ext4 partition and I installed Debian in this partiton with debootstrap. It worked, but it´s not possible to install GRUB or LILO (because the kernel cannot get disk information) so I booted with a USB drive and, in the GRUB menu of the USB drive, I used the GRUB command line to boot into Debian. It went fine, but I couldn’t set up graphics.