Arch Linux

Reznor

Member

From: BiH

Registered: 2012-06-23

Posts: 78

[SOLVED] Baytrail tablet boot blank screen

I got this nice tablet which came with Windows 8.1 preinstalled and of course it's upgradable to Windows 10 straight ahead. The problem is that Windows 8.1 works fine, but it is outdated and Windows 10 is performing very slow, probably 2GB isn't much.
As I don't like Windows much I would like to put Arch Linux on this thing. Until now I have tried few Linux distributions such as Debian 8.5, Ubuntu 14.04.3, 16.04.3 and 17.10, Fedora Workstation, all just copied onto EFI FAT32 formatted stick. Grub menu showed up, I hit enter on first option and surprise - just a blank screen and it stays like this forever. I found some suggestions to put bootia32.efi in EFI folder and tried to boot from EFI shell, it says IA32 is not supported from this X64 shell, so it seems to be 64 bit EFI, not 32 bit like many baytrail tablets.
Also I tried suggestions from this wiki: https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/In … ete_freeze
I tried to put following flags in grub line and boot
intel_idle.max_cstate=1
video=SVIDEO-1:d
nomodeset
i915.modeset=0
It makes no difference.
What else can I try?
Here are specifications of the tablet: http://www.prestigio.com/catalogue/Arch … duct-specs
Thanks in advance.

UPDATE: Ubuntu 14.04 (the oldest one) shows splash screen then throws to (initramfs) Unable to find a medium containing a live file system. Debian 8.5 throws me to grub shell.
UPDATE2: FreeBSD latest version boots just fine...

Last edited by Reznor (2017-12-10 11:57:28)

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Reznor

Member

From: BiH

Registered: 2012-06-23

Posts: 78

Re: [SOLVED] Baytrail tablet boot blank screen

Issue solved. Adding noapic flag fixed the problem and now it boots every Linux distribution. I tried a lot of distributions and none worked until I came across Linux Mint and its compatibility mode. I tried every boot flag out there until I got the right one.
Now there comes the fun part to find the suitable distribution, because many of them have touchscreen issues. Ubuntu 17.10 works fine, 16.04.3 has no working touch at all, Linux Mint 18.3 opens Screenshot n times and sometimes doesn't register touch, and Fedora has backlight issues, it does lower and raise the backlight on its own. Funny how some of the latest versions of Linux distributions with GNOME Desktop have different issues with touchscreen. I guess I need to continue researching what works the best on this tablet.

Last edited by Reznor (2017-12-10 11:53:14)

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