[SOLVED?]Re: Linux, Lenovo, AMD Radeon

[Petter Adsen]

On Sun, 28 Feb 2016 23:01:56 +1100
Karl Auer <kauer at biplane.com.au> wrote:

> On Sun, 2016-02-28 at 12:14 +0100, Petter Adsen wrote:
> > Karl Auer <kauer at biplane.com.au> wrote:  
> > > I have progress of sorts to report.  
> 
> I now have MUCH MORE progress to report. I just installed Ubuntu
> successfully to the hard disk and then booted it from a menu
> containing Ubuntu and Windows. The firmware gave me the UEFI entries,
> I selected ubuntu, and Ubuntu showed me itself and Windows as
> options. All a bit circuitous.

Well, it actually kind of makes sense. GRUB has the ability to
chain-load Windows, so if you set the Ubuntu entry to be the default
boot, you will still retain the ability to boot Windows from the GRUB
menu. I think Windows' boot manager is supposed to work in much the
same way, as any EFI-compliant boot manager can 'see' all EFI boot
entries, but as I don't have Windows I can't verify this.

(If you want a fancier boot manager, look into rEFInd[1].)

> Unfortunately I have no idea what has made it work this time. The
> manual change to the UEFI boot information? The manual install of the
> grub-efi-amd64 package? Both? At any rate, it seems to be working, or
> at least the basics are.

I would guess the manual change with efibootmgr, but I am completely at
a loss as to why the installer couldn't manage this. If you ever manage
to figure it out (which would probably require following the log on a
server image install), please file a bug.

> Still no network (except the dongle) but I can live with that (i.e.,
> work it out later). Not all the special function keys seem to work
> and I haven't tried suspending the thing yet :-) Nor have I checked
> that Windows still boots.

If you can post a new thread with lcpci output about your wifi
controller, maybe someone can help. Some laptops need a package
installed to handle special function keys, a search would probably be
fruitful :)

> But I'm way happier than I was this morning.

Good :)

> To all those that helped me, and especially to Petter, many many
> thanks.

You are very welcome, glad you got it working!

> PS: The new "ubuntu" UEFI entry references \EFI\ubuntu\shimx64.efi. Is
> it possible to look at what is actually present in the directory? The
> boot entries are just pointers.

After boot, you can just look in /boot/efi/EFI/ubuntu, as the ESP is
mounted on /boot/efi. The entries you manage with efibootmgr are all
relative to this root. The UEFI specification actually uses \ as a
path separator, but efibootmgr translates this automatically. If you
use bcfg in a UEFI shell you need to use \, however.

Petter

-- 
"I'm ionized"
"Are you sure?"
"I'm positive."