Installing Ubuntu 18.04 on a Lenovo 100S
Jose Ramon Huerga Ayuso
Lead of Integration Engineering at Axpo | MuleSoft Ambassador | AWS Certified
Recently a friend purchased a Lenovo IdeaPad 100S and asked me to install Ubuntu on his laptop, as its tiny hard drive makes quite difficult to use Windows 10 normally. This guide describes step by step how I did the installation
Lenovo IdeaPad 100S
This laptop is very affordable, as it can be bought by less than 200 €. However, it has only 2 GB of RAM and a tiny hard drive of 32 GB. Although it has a 64-bit processor (Intel Atom Z3735F) its UEFI is of 32-bits.
Creation of a USB installer
Fedora 27 has added support to boot on a 32 bit UEFI firmware in laptops with 64-bit processors. Anyway, I decided to install Ubuntu 18.04 on the laptop, as this distro is more widely used. However, Ubuntu does not natively support booting on a 32 bit UEFI, so it is needed to modify the Ubuntu ISO image. The steps required to create a USB installer are:
- Download Ubuntu 18.04 Desktop.
- Download Rufus to create a bootable USB disk
- Use Rufus to copy the ISO image of Ubuntu on a memory stick of at least 4 GB. Choose GPT and FAT32.
- Download the file bootia32.efi from GitHub. Copy the file on the folder /EFI/boot in the memory stick.
After that, you will need to enter in the UEFI of the Lenovo laptop (pressing F2) to disable Secure Boot and reset to Install Mode. Then, you can plug the memory stick on the Lenovo laptop and choose to boot from the USB. I recommend to boot to the "Live Desktop" of Ubuntu, and only after you have checked that everything works nice (especially wifi connection) perform the installation of Ubuntu. You may find useful this guide.
Fixing audio issues
Once the installation of Ubuntu finished, I noticed that the audio was not working at all. To fix it, I followed these steps:
- Copy under /usr/share/alsa/ucm/ the folders bytcr-rt5640 and bytcr-rt5651 found in GitHub.
- Create a file under the folder /etc/modprobe.d named blacklist_snd_hdmi_lpe_audio.conf containing just a line with this content: blacklist snd_hdmi_lpe_audio . More information here and here.
- Follow the steps 1 to 4 of the Ubuntu Sound Troubleshooting Procedure
And .. voilà! After doing those steps I was able to play YouTube videos on Firefox and the audio worked properly.
Fixing login page freeze
Another annoying bug of Ubuntu is that it sometimes freezes in the login screen, making impossible to move the mouse, to press any key, etc.
To avoid this problem, I just configured the account of my friend with automatic login. To do it, I launched the settings app and clicked on User Accounts, setting to ON the field Automatic Login on the desired account.