I’ve been limping along for a while now on an old Intel i5-4200u based laptop that I picked up in graduate school back in 2014. These days I’ve taken to doing more and more light work away from my desktop, and dealing with the machines anemic CPU has started to exceed my patience, to say nothing of some of the fixable annoyances like a defucnt battery and a terrible physical experience in the form of weight and a non-responsive touchpad.
To that end, I spent some time this fall scoping out potential replacements as essentially a text processing machine. My view has always been that a laptops first and second jobs (in either order) are to be functional enough for non-primary use (to whatever extreme you personally decide is adequate), and readily portable to travel where you want to bring it. For me, that means being light enough and small enough that I’d lug it around without a second thought.
The laptop I opted to go for was a Lunar Lake-based Yoga Slim 7i Aura. I won’t get too much into the specifics about the specs, you can look that up yourself, but my end goal is to run Linux on this thing just like all my other machines, with as few compromises as possible, and no fuckery. The bottom-line-up-front unfortunately is that at all of 8-days past the release of Linux Kernel 6.12 (which enables most of the Lunar Lake initial support functions), this laptop is nowhere near being Linux ready.
Windows Setup
As a Linux nut, the first thing I needed to do was to get the laptop into some sort of functional state, independent of my desire to run Linux on the thing. To try to avoid the whole Microsoft Account shenanigans, I opted to avoid connecting the laptop to my network until after I had finished the OEM setup process. This turned out to be relatively painless overall. I followed the steps at the following website: How to bypass internet connection to install Windows 11 - Pureinfotech
In the event the website goes away. The instructions amounted to going through setup until you reach the screen that tries to force you to setup a network connection, then to press Shift-F10 to open up a command prompt. Typing OOBE\BYPASSNRO will trigger a restart. From then you’ll repeat the first couple of setup steps, but at the WiFi setup screen you’ll see an “I don’t have internet” text non-button button to continue through the setup process. Eventually you’ll end up at Windows 11 proper.
Physical Impressions
I’m happy with the overall product. The display isn’t OLED, but I didn’t see any light bleed (after using it more, there is very slight bleed near the “bump” around the web camera), and the contrast is quite good. One of the reasons I picked this thing up was for the 500 nit display knowing it would give me a brighter experience overall.
While I was tinkering with the machine at a local big-box electronics store, I noted the good but not class leading track pad responsiveness. Frankly, the pointing precision is a tad better than the multi-thousand dollar Dell machine that my employer pushes on me over using a Desktop workstation, which was really the bar I had for acceptability. The pointer is precise and fast enough to do the subset of things that I can’t fall back to a touchscreen to work with, and pushing up on good enough that I might be okay without a touchscreen or proper mouse entirely. Not quite, but close.
The audio visual experience is very good. I pulled up a personal rip I had of the Lord of the Rings HDR Bluray to quickly test it. The audio was immersive, and the added dynamic range of the display pleasantly enhanced the opening scenes of the Fellowship of the Ring. With a hour or two of futzing with Windows, it was time to get underway testing Linux.
Linux Steps and Plan
I knew that the Lunar Lake series of Intel processors really only came around in kernel version 6.12, which by my luck released only a week or so before I’m writting this post. I’m a don’t-fuck-with-it kind of user though, so my plan was to try to find the least annoying way to get up and running.
On my decrepit 2014 Acer laptop, I’ve been trying out Fedora Silverblue as a not-my–primary-workstation operating system, living with Gnome rather than my favored KDE, and leaning on Firefox Sync, and Seafile as the two main ways to get this mobile system working the way I want it to work.
Fedora Silverblue v41 is the current release, with a 6.11 series kernel, just shy of my needs. So to get started, I pulled the latest nightly of the Fedora rpm-ostree image (which to my understanding eventually becomes Fedora Silverblue), and booted into it to see what I could get working.
To go through this process, I ran into one item to do before I even tried an installer, disable windows drive encryption. While I don’t mind the drive encryption in and of itself, if the drive is/was encrypted the odds of me successfully partitioning it to give Linux some space to exist were/are slim to none. I didn’t even try to resize the partition without decrypting the drive.
Next, I wanted Windows in a “healthy” state. While I don’t want to use it, in the event Linux turned into an outright faff, I wanted Windows to be only prickly and not thorny. To that end, once I’d disabled as much adware as I could find, I ran the full suite of Windows updates. Which took most of the evening.
Actually Trying Linux
To get into the BIOS, this machine uses an undocumented F2 key which allows for a limited set of boot options. One of these was to enable Microsoft’s third party certificate bundle, which allows major Linux distributions using a signed kernel to boot without disabling Secure Boot.
Once that was done, F12 will bring up the boot menu for attached and internal drives. This has to be done to boot any installation media as the default boot order always places known items (read, internal storage) before attached items.
Lets just say it was not a great success out of the gate. Fedora’s rawhide releases were the most promising given the kernels were the most up to date, but each boot left me with a non-functioning track pad and touchscreen when in the installers, and enough unfamiliarity that I wasn’t about to try re-partitioning my one working disk with a temperamental installer.
The very next day, Lenovo’s Windows software pushed out a firmware update for the track pad, the touchscreen, and the BIOS proper, which I was hopeful would clean up the install pain. Unfortunately, the bugs gating booting most consistently for me are NetworkManager.service startup failures that are unrelated to all three of the above. The long and short of this for me is that the major Hardware Enamblement kernel only dropped 8 days ago, and until the boot situation has settled down I’m unlikely to make much headway.
Next Steps
In the short term, I would like to modify a live ISO and trying to trim down the NetworkManager timeout from the default 10 minutes (yes, because Fedora designs these images with monster network machines in mind) down to 15 seconds to see if I get a bit more sane behavior with a more aggressive timeout. The snag being when unsquashing and resquashing the filesystem for use, the boot begins to fail earlier in the boot process, presumably because it’s unable to find the modified squashfs.img due to some sort of UUID based identification that I’m not setting up quite right.
I’ll post back once some more distributions are rolling out their nightlies with 6.12 series kernels to see where we’re trending, and hopefully contribute to the hardware enablement. In the short term I’ll pull what information I can out of Windows for the various hardware elements with the goal of writing up what I can about the hardware in the device.
Last modified on 2024-11-24