Just completed the installation of Linux Mint 18 on a new Acer Aspire E5-575-33BM as a Christmas present for my wife. Her 2007 Intel Core Duo Macbook 2,1 running LM 17.2 was getting too cranky and the battery life was getting shorter so it was time for an update/upgrade. I’d considered getting her a Chromebook but the price delta was not that much between getting a 15.6″ Chromebook (which has printing issues) and this machine which included a 1TB disk. She can always use my Chromebook by simply logging in with her Gmail account, so there was little to lose by going with the more capable machine.
She has become very comfortable with using Linux over the past year plus on her Mac and it has met all her computing needs so it was a no-brainer to avoid the intrusive solution that is Win 10 and go Linux on this unit too. The following are the steps I took to make it work. Got some clues from here and here.
- Update Acer Firmware. The update tool works only under Windows, so I did this before modifying the machine. Booted into Win 10, did only a basic system set up (including disabling ALL automatic updates before connecting to the web) and then ran the FW update downloaded off the Acer site. Latest FW (jumping two versions) installed fine.
- Twiddled some FW settings (press F2 at power on) to allow for Legacy mode booting off a Linux Mint 18 MATE live USB image and tested basic functionality – pretty much everything worked fine. Cool. Shut down and remove back panel to do some HW work.
- Swapped out the Samsung EVO 850 SSD from her old Macbook to the new Acer, removing the 1TB disk for safe keeping with the Windows 10 install. Just swapped the applicable disk caddies and put the SSD in. For giggles I twiddled the FW once more to use Legacy (BIOS) mode and was able to boot the existing LM 17.2 image just fine on the new machine, but the wireless did not work and it was a 32 bit install, so it was time to install a new version for the 64bit machine.
- Updated FW settings once more to enable USB boot for the installation and disabled Secure Boot (yet UEFI was enabled).
- Booted live USB for installation. As for some strange reason I did not follow my common practice in the old LM 17.2 installation to set up a separate home partition, I needed to migrate the contents of home to someplace safe – so I used GParted to create and resize partitions for both home and the UEFI boot files (and to create backup images). Used FSArchiver (Partimage doesn’t work on ext4 file systems, which my prior install was on) to create a backup disk image of the old 17.2 environment. Migrated the home directory files using GRsync to the new /home partition. Installed LM 18 from the live USB, which took a surprisingly short time with a wired Ethernet connection.
- Bring up FW set up once more and enabled Secure Boot again. Within FW “trust”ed the UEFI partition files for Secure Boot. Reboot and come up in new LM 18 environment. Using Driver Manager, installed the intel_microcode firmware to support the i3 processor. Reboot as required by Driver Manager.
- Run Mint Update Manager and install all 167 offered updates. Onboard wireless works, but is incredibly slow (1 MB/s), yet all available updates are installed. Tried a bunch of online solutions to update the Atheros Ath10k firmware and kernel, etc. which didn’t work – and ended up causing some problems when I tried backing them out – so I ended up repeating the installation of Mint once more from the FW/Secure Boot settings through to the reboot required by Driver Manager above.
I have on hand an Edimax USB WiFi dongle with a Realtek chipset, so tried that one out via Network Manager and it connected at 54 MB/s right away. So for the time being, we’re sticking with that one and pretty much everything now works – sound, volume control via function keys, wireless, video playback, Jacquie Lawson Christmas Web Advent Calendar card (HTML5 or flash-based?). Brightness control does not work via the function keys yet but does work with the software control.
Machine is very snappy under Linux (much faster than it seemed under Windows 10) and idles with just single digit percentages of CPU core use and a small fraction of the 4MB DIMM capacity being used. Screen is very nice. Battery life is still TBD under normal use (as I was hitting it pretty hard with all the installation work), but it definitely goes for at least something like 6+ hours.
Think this one will work out well for some time into the future – the OS is supported until 2021!
I deleted windows before doing the update firmware! what do i do now? :/
Sorry to hear that. I was fortunate to be able to keep the Windows disk around just in case.
First, did you check to see if you’re already at the latest FW version? Is the machine operating OK with the current FW? If so, smile.
If not, you can check the change log for the release(s) to see if you’re missing anything critical. Did you delete the recovery partition? If still there, you could reinstall Windows that way. Hopefully the FW changes missed will be minor and not impact your operation – I hope that’s the case. Good luck!