Friday, April 15, 2016

Acer R5 471T and Tumbleweed/Windows dual boot



First what you notice is that laptop is very slim design. Keyboard looks so thin, make you think they don't actually move while typing at all :) But when you start to type, it is really great! Screen is very glossy so even a smallest light reflection will make you move your head to proper angle. But it is great for indoor use.

After pushing power button, Windows has booted in couple of seconds. Great, everything works, even keyboard back-light and multi touch screen! And now let's install Linux along with installed Windows 10.

First install partition manager and resize 250GB parition to 150GB to make 100GB of unpartitioned space.

Next you want to make a USB installation stick. For OpenSUSE Tumbleweed you need to use ImageUSB.
Download Tumbleweed DVD ISO image from HERE.

Stick your flash drive with Tumbleweed installation to usb slot. Enter BIOS with F2 end enable Boot select with F12, or continue to Boot section and move USB Flash drive to first position.

After that installation will start. Because we have UEFI secure boot enabled it will ask us for confirmation to trust opensuse binaries for booting. After that installation will find unpartitioned space and suggest partition setup for root, home and swap paritions. Also it will set a boot mount point to EFI boot partition. This will install EFI binaries to proper place inside EFI boot parition.

After installation is finished it will reboot to windows again. It is because windows is overriding grub boot settings. To get around this open command prompt as administrator and execute:
bcdedit /set {bootmgr} path \EFI\opensuse\shim.efi

Finally grub menu! Tumbleweed has booted but WiFi is not showing any networks found, and it says WiFi not available.
$ sudo lspci
01:00.0 Network controller: Qualcomm Atheros QCA6174 802.11ac Wireless Network Adapter (rev 32)

There is problem in firmware for this WiFi card and it does not work with 4.5.x kernel.
Solution is to download Windows firmware binary and replace it with current linux version like so:

$ sudo cp /lib/firmware/ath10k/QCA6174/hw3.0/board.bin /lib/firmware/ath10k/QCA6174/hw3.0/board.bin.orig
$ sudo mv ~/Downloads/eeprom_ar6320_3p0_NFA364xp.bin /lib/firmware/ath10k/QCA6174/hw3.0/board.bin
$ sudo reboot

Finally fully operative dual boot!
Enjoy!