Installing Linux on the Pred. 500 amd version

666JTK666

Howdy,

I am considering the purchase of the Pred. 500 amd version for linux only.

My question is weather any of you guys had any problems or gotcha's getting linux installed on the laptop and if so what you did to over come the issues.

666JTK666

I dont see a  way to edit my org post. model number is

PH517-61-R0GX

My understanding is that the 2nd M.2 slot is sata only. I am looking at the samsung evo 860 2TB drive for that slot. Are there any capacity limitations I shuold be aware of ?

sbfeibish

Over at Amazon, in the questions and answers section, the Acer rep said:

"This model supports up to 64GB using four RAM slots. Memory type supported is DDR4 2666 SO-DIMM, or DDR4 2400 SO-DIMM."

"This model has two SATA M.2 SSD slots (1 SSD slot also supports PCI-e Gen3 x4). "

"There are two M.2 slots on this model. The tested capacities are: 
SATA3 Hard disk drive 
1 TB / 2 TB 2.5-inch 5400 RPM 
Solid state drive 
256 GB / 512 GB, PCIe Gen3 8 Gb/s up to 4 lanes, NVMe 
128 / 256 / 512 GB / SATA 6 Gb/s "

Then this next statement, also from Acer says:
"This has two M.2 SSD slots that support SATA or PCI-e Gen3 x4 SSD's. These two slots support up to 512GB M.2 SSD."

Amazon customers refute this.  

Torfi Þrastarson· Dec 13 says:
"I currently have a 1tb ssd in both m. 2 slots and in the sata3 slot for a total of 3TB" 

Bart Bugay Dec 12, says:
"Any size ssd or m.2 should work. I personally put a 1tb 860 Evo in the 2.5 inch and it worked just fine. Haven’t seen anyone else complaining about an m.2 size restriction so I’m sure what they said was just what the factory QA tests were to make sure the slots work."

Greg Carter wrote, Dec. 11th
"I have Fedora 29 on it, and it works great. Fast as the dixons! 
So it makes an excellent LINUX workstation"

One answer was interesting.  The BIOS lets you turn on Intel virtualization, not AMD virtualization.  I have the computer and hope turn it on for the 1st time today and check that out.  

sbfeibish

What follows is what influenced my purchase.  Note the fine print.

Fast systems need fast drives. Avoid potential bottlenecks by equipping your Helios 500 with up to two PCIe NVME SSDs1 in Raid 0 and up to 2TB1 of HDD storage.

1 Specifications may vary depending on model and/or region. All models subject to availability. 

666JTK666

One of the reasons I was considering this laptop is that I want to do quite a bit of virtual machine work, if there is no option to turn on amd's vert then I need to look elce where. Thank you for that tidbit. saved me a ton of hassle.

quadcricket

On my PH517-61-R0GX lscpu shows Virtualization: AMD-V
The only "gotcha" I've seen is the power cable is not always recognized. I have resorted to having to manually setting the CPU/GPU states since Linux always thinks it's on battery.

I have one 2.5" 1TB SATA drive, one 1TB M.2 SATA drive, and one 256MB NVME drive installed.