{"id":2744,"date":"2015-12-03T17:29:01","date_gmt":"2015-12-04T01:29:01","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/upon2020.com\/blog\/?p=2744"},"modified":"2015-12-03T17:29:01","modified_gmt":"2015-12-04T01:29:01","slug":"installing-arch-linux-on-an-acer-cloudbook","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/upon2020.com\/blog\/2015\/12\/installing-arch-linux-on-an-acer-cloudbook\/","title":{"rendered":"Installing Arch Linux on an Acer Cloudbook"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignright\" alt=\"\" src=\"http:\/\/o.aolcdn.com\/hss\/storage\/midas\/ec31ec1c0579b3e17627747f5743ed10\/202414489\/acer-aspire-one-cloudbook.jpg\" width=\"960\" height=\"640\" \/><br \/>\nThe Acer Cloudbook is one of the cheapest laptops on the market. It&#8217;s also light, thin and quite nice, and so I picked one up from Fry&#8217;s to use as a travel laptop. It comes with Windows pre-installed, unfortunately, but of course I didn&#8217;t want that. Here are my notes how I got <a href=\"http:\/\/archlinux.org\/\">Arch Linux<\/a> running on it, in the hope that it saves others some time. I may not have all the names entirely correct, as I didn&#8217;t write down every single detail:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Write the Arch Linux installer image to a spare USB flash drive.<\/li>\n<li>With the laptop off, insert the USB stick.<\/li>\n<li>Booting the laptop, press F2 to get into the BIOS.<\/li>\n<li>In the BIOS:\n<ul>\n<li>change the boot order to boot from the USB stick in preference to booting from the built-in drive<\/li>\n<li>set the boot type to &#8220;legacy&#8221;<\/li>\n<li>set the trackpad type to &#8220;traditional&#8221; (not &#8220;smart&#8221;)<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n<li>Save changed BIOS settings and reboot<\/li>\n<li>Once the Arch boot loader has come up, edit the kernel boot line to add &#8220;edd=off noapic&#8221;. Without those parameters, the machine will hang during boot.<\/li>\n<li>Once the machine has booted from the USB stick, install Arch:\n<ul>\n<li>Change partition label type from GPT to DOS<\/li>\n<li>Using fdisk, blow away the existing partitions, and create the partitions you want<\/li>\n<li>Follow the usual Arch install process: creating partitions, formatting, pacstrap, updating the new \/etc\/fstab etc.<\/li>\n<li>I installed grub as the boot loader (this required the &#8220;legacy&#8221; boot type in the BIOS, I could not get it to work otherwise)<\/li>\n<li>Before grub-mkconfig, edit \/etc\/default\/grub to add &#8220;edd=off noapic&#8221; to the kernel parameters so I don&#8217;t have to enter them every time<\/li>\n<li>reboot<\/li>\n<li>remove USB stick<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n<li>The machine should now boot from the internal drive<\/li>\n<li>The first screenful of console messages comes up in an unreadable font. I don&#8217;t know why that is, but I don&#8217;t mind because there&#8217;s nothing reported there that I need to know.<\/li>\n<li>Continue setup of networking, X11 etc. the normal way. I had no trouble with drivers. WiFi worked out of the box with systemd-networkd and wpa_supplicant. The trackpad didn&#8217;t work until I set the trackpad type to &#8220;traditional&#8221; in the BIOS (see above)<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>So far, a nice little machine.<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The Acer Cloudbook is one of the cheapest laptops on the market. It&#8217;s also light, thin and quite nice, and so I picked one up from Fry&#8217;s to use as a travel laptop. It comes with Windows pre-installed, unfortunately, but of course I didn&#8217;t want that. Here are my notes how I got Arch Linux&hellip;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"webmentions_disabled":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[66],"tags":[418,417,421,420,419,409],"class_list":["post-2744","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-technical","tag-acer","tag-arch","tag-cloudbook","tag-install","tag-laptop","tag-linux","kind-"],"kind":false,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/upon2020.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2744","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/upon2020.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/upon2020.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/upon2020.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/upon2020.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2744"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/upon2020.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2744\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2747,"href":"https:\/\/upon2020.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2744\/revisions\/2747"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/upon2020.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2744"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/upon2020.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2744"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/upon2020.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2744"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}