I am fairly technical and use PopOS as my daily driver, but my kid's school system is going full time remote, and I'm gonna be that dad who makes him use a linux laptop if he's gonna be stuck looking at it all day for 6 months or more. So I thought I'd buy a decent student notebook which seemed to be linux-compatible, and put eOS on it. Might be a perfect fit!
Computer is a Lenovo IdeaPad 5 15are05. Ryzen 5 4500U, with integrated AMD graphics.
However, I am having difficulty getting the OS installed.
- I downloaded the USB ISO, flashed it to a drive, and verified everything with md5sum.
- I made sure the machine BIOS was fully up to date
- I disabled Secure Boot
- I booted the machine, used F12 to get to the boot menu, and chose the USB drive.
I get the "Try or Install elementary OS" screen. Looks fine. I hit "enter" to boot, but it just goes to a black screen and sits.
I have tried a bunch of stuff. Not too familiar with GRUB (as PopOS doesn't use it) but I thought that I could get debug kernel boot output by hitting "e" at that screen and switching "quiet splash" to "debug nosplash", but no luck there. Still just a black screen.
Anything else to try? Is it possible that the kernel in the boot image is too old to wrangle this processor? Am I out of luck here?
Things I've tried (will expand list as I try more things):
- Tried booting Arch Linux 2020.08.01 USB ISO without issue, which is based on the 5.7.11 kernel. Perhaps it's indeed the eOS kernel.
- Tried "nomodeset" as a kernel arg, but still got a black screen.
Thanks for any pointers!