Frustrating day today. No progress on getting the new laptops installed or backed up. Some things point at a grub bug that's been around for >1 year so every distro's live iso is broken and it complains. The Lenovo BIOS has a frustrating lack of options to twiddle.
Next things to try are disabling the TPM, and after that, probably starting to spleunk for older images to find one that works. If all else fails I can probably build my own installer with a correct version.
It's really ridiculously frustrating to be blocked at the very beginning here on something like that I have very little visibility into. I understand that GRUB needs to be small as a bootloader but I definitely could use more info than "out of memory". Can you give me *any* information about why? Absolutely not.
I'm pretty resilient to tinkering with things once I can get a kernel loaded, I'll even compile modules and find firmware for the install, but hamstrung at the bootloader is arrrrrgh.
Partial success today, as I have booted Debian 10.0 and made it to the point where I can backup the internal drive. Given this old old grub2 works, I'm wondering if this is something we will be able to fix for Debian bookworm. I'll need to investigate more and possibly write up my struggles for the benefit of future geeks.
For now, I backup using dd, gzip and ssh. Only 5 hours estimated for the 1T drive backup. Considering finding an alternate target for the backup 😅
One of the annoying things about this bug is that there are a bunch of things to try if you have an installed Linux system, and none of them are usable to initially install a system.
Now that I have a candidate installation media, even if it's from 2019, after backup I can install and claw my way into the present and also engage the workarounds for the bug.
Slowly clawing my way into the present-day kernels. Hoping that at some point the builtin keyboard will start to work ðŸ«
(The builtin keyboard started working with the unstable Debian kernel)
have you said yet what model this is? Was a time once I would take media into a store to make sure it would boot to a live system, but options to do that have been thinning out.
(Understood if you're reserving that level of detail for a write-up)
got a non-Yoga, used, now, but model before that was a foldover Yoga 14. Before that, a Twist.
Our kid is big into touchscreens so I guess I felt like I should give it a try in that size, but meh.
@jamuraa shot in the dark here but do the laptops have discrete or on-chip graphics?
I saw the same bs out of memory errors a while back on an Intel Lenovo with integrated gpu and the thing that fixed it was turning down the configured video memory in the BIOS. IIRC I had to set it to like 64 or 128MB to get the sticks to boot.
@jamuraa You could try giving the Fedora Workstation Live image a try. We just released Fedora 38 so it's full of recent fixes for various things :)
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