Linux on VN7-792G

Hi,

has anyone successfully installed _any_ linux distribution (Ubuntu, Lubuntu, Fedora, Arch, Debian) on the Acer V7 Nitro VN7-792G Laptop?

The most important specs

- i6700HQ Skylake CPU

- Nvidia Geforce 950M

- Atheros Wireless card

I will document my progress here so everybody else can benefit from it.

I tried:

- Lubuntu 15.10

- Linux Mint

- Manjaro Linux (Arch based)

- Kubuntu 15.04

I don't want to mess with the Windows Installation (yet), so my instalation target was always the slower HDD.

Overall status is that it is currently quite painful during my tests I encountered various problems and solutions.

One of the biggest problems is that it seems that the nouveau driver actually hangs/freezes the system, or to be more correctly the framebuffer.

With Nouveau enabled I could not get any system to boot reliably, not even the installers!

So first of all boot your installer with

modprobe.blacklist=nouveau

appended to the boot commandline (in grub press e, go to the linux line and insert this at the end, press ctrl-x to boot)

Depending on the version and confiiguration it sometimes helps also to set

i915.preliminary_hw_support=1

as well. It definitely changes the behavior, sometimes for the better sometimes for the worse.

I'll create a post for each distro with my findings

Accepted answers

All comments

bro85

Installer crashed/froze -- did not follow that route further.

bro85

Installer did boot successfully to live cd

- no touchpad

- no wireless

- wired networking works

Installation did proceed smothly, however the UEFI/BIOS did not detect is as a suitable boot source.

My guess is that it installed grub as a legacy bios installation, not a uefi based one.

However switching bios to legacy mode did not change the situation.

Did not investigate further

bro85

Okay this one almost worked.

Installer booted fine

- no wifi

- no touchpad

- wired network

The system installed fine, and grub appeared in the boot menu.

Grub did even present me with the Windows option - so perfect dual boot.

So manjaro did something right which the others didn't.

From grub I could actually boot into my manjaro system -- at least to the console.

The X server name came up.

Going through the logs I figured out that it somehow wanted to make use of the "nvidia" driver,

which failed completely.

So I had a look at

/etc/xorg.d/xorg.conf

and did change nvidia to intel.

Reboot -- I had a login gui.

After login however the whole X/framebuffer got messed up when I moved the mouse in addition to being a super small resolution.

So I removed

/etc/xorg.d/xorg.conf

completely, reboot.

--> Working Desktop!

However still

- no touchpad

- no wireless

I experimented with the

- driver backport project

- the atheros firmware packages

- the touchpad settings

- newer/older kernelversions, as well as my own kernel compile.

But nothing really made a difference.

Booting was not always stable...

Then I tried Lubuntu and killed this installation.

bro85

This one was close to good.

The installer booted fine to live cd.

The trackpad was working

still no wireless but okay

The installation went good, until the point where it tried to install grub - which failed.

Invoking it manually it seemed again that it wanted to install it as legacy.

I tried to install grub manually for efi - it did show up in efibootmgr but it was gone after next reboot.

sudo mount /dev/sdb3 /mnt
sudo mount /dev/sdb1 /mnt/boot/efi
sudo grub-install --root-directory=/mnt --efi-directory=/mnt/boot/efi --target x86_64-efi /dev/sdb

So I'm left with windows at the moment.

Next try is probably to install manjaro first (for the bootloader) and then install lubuntu in parallel

Drnoa

I got it to install with a older version of ubuntu 14.04.
I was not able to get grub loading before the windows efi boot entry. So i copied the windows efi entry one folder upward an copied the grub loader to the windows efi entry.

Still working on the trackpad an the wifi.
The trackpad works with kernel 3.13. But not with the newer kernel versions.

Drnoa

Here some more informations.

touchpad

Actual my touchpad works. I had to do the following steps:

* in the bios there is a touchpad setting witch i had to change from "advanced" to "normal"

* install the synaptic packages with "sudo apt-get install synaptic"

wireless module

the wireless card is not working until now. Its a known problem.

The related bug-report you find here:

https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/linux/+bug/1520343

graphics

i installed nvidia driver (in my case nvidia-352).

i followed the steps from the following post:

http://askubuntu.com/questions/549915/how-to-install-nvidia-drivers-with-bumblebee-on-ubuntu-14-04

everything else works out of the box.

Drnoa

Fix the wireless bug:

Here is a solution for the wirless problems

--------------------

sudo mkdir -p /lib/firmware/ath10k/QCA6174/hw3.0/

sudo rm /lib/firmware/ath10k/QCA6174/hw3.0/* 2> /dev/null

sudo wget -O /lib/firmware/ath10k/QCA6174/hw3.0/board.bin https://github.com/FireWalkerX/ath10k-firmware/blob/7e56cbb94182a2fdab110cf5bfeded8fd1d44d30/QCA6174/hw3.0/board-2.bin?raw=true

sudo wget -O /lib/firmware/ath10k/QCA6174/hw3.0/firmware-4.bin https://github.com/FireWalkerX/ath10k-firmware/blob/7e56cbb94182a2fdab110cf5bfeded8fd1d44d30/QCA6174/hw3.0/firmware-4.bin_WLAN.RM.2.0-00180-QCARMSWPZ-1?raw=true

sudo chmod +x /lib/firmware/ath10k/QCA6174/hw3.0/*

--------------------

but there is another problem with the acutal drivers/kernel.

Internal microphone not working

https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/alsa-driver/+bug/1523100

Svato

Fix the wireless bug:

Hi Drnoa,

thanks for help but this onli works for several types of cards, in my case i have to wait for next linux update i guess

Svato

Linux on VN7-792G -- Mint 17.3 Mate

Nvidia driver seems to work properlly, version-370. Tested OpenGL support, although i am not able to get on working detection of external displays. I have the same problem in win 10 while using dualboot. Separatelly i had no problem, just throught grub.

Wifi in my case still not working, i have read bug report on this problem but no fix was working for me.

Did you find the same display problem using another distributions?

gigi_Acer

Hi, now I use since 4 mounth Ubuntu 16.04. The main problem is with wifi. I Have just ubutu no dual boot! .

Also the usb vers.4 (the smaller between the two USB 3.0) doesn't running. I have not understad fine.. because sometime running and sometime no. I must look into.