Saturday, December 2, 2017

Ubuntu 17.10 running on Lenovo Yoga 920 with HiDPI and touch screen support


I resized the windows partiton to the minimun necessary (100G), disabled secure boot and I also remove bitlocker key encryption on windows drive, this allows Ubuntu to see that partition and allow windows to boot with secure boot disabled, without complaning.

This makes everything go easier if you want to keep windows arround on the same disk and dual boot with Ubuntu, you should do this it helps a lot. Even after you disable this, you can re-enable it back, both secure boot and bitlocker key encryption.

Before installing on windows updates resize your windows partition, installing all windows updates will not alow you to gain as much space as possible. After resizing the windows partition to the minimium size you want, install all windows updates, bios and driver updates.

I upgraded all windows updates to the latest version and all drivers to the latest version and upgraded the bios on windows to the latest version before installing Ubuntu, I don't think this makes much difference but at least I did it to make sure I have the latest firmware on all components and latest bios before installing Ubuntu.

To get to the bios press and hold Fn+F2 (bios) or Fn+F12 (USB boot devices), or insert a clip on the small orifice next to the power button while the laptop is powered off.

On reboot, it seems I had no wireless. A simple blacklisting of the ideapad_laptop module, for now, gets things working.

Everything else seems to be working fine.

Works:
  • all special keys
  • keyboard lights
  • bluetooth, WiFi
  • trackpad
  • touch screen
  • keyboard and mouse pad are disable in tablet mode
  • camera
  • hibernate
  • hidpi
  • pen works like a mouse, but there no apps on Ubuntu that I know that use the pen, using gnomes-boxes I tried windows 10 using sketchbook and it is slow, but it works fine.


Not Working:fingerprint reader
  • fingerprint reader
  • screen rotation not working, while in tablet mode.


Dual Boot Setup
  • Before installing any windows updates, bios or driver updates, resize your windows partition in windows to the minimun size you want, otherwise windows updates might constrain the amount of free disk space you can reclaim. I reduced the windows partition size (to 100Gb) using Disk Management utility to the desired capacity to make space for Linux.
  • http://www.everydaylinuxuser.com/2015/11/how-to-shrink-windows-10-to-make-space.html
  • Disable secure boot in bios, use your windows bitlocker key from windows website to be able to boot windows and after that remove secure block key encryption from you windows partition. This will make it much easier, see online instructions is easy. (optional step)
  • Download and install all windows updates. The pre-installed Lenovo service utility prompts to update the firmware.  I went ahead with it.
  • To get to the bios press Fn+F2 (bios) or Fn+F12 (USB boot devices), or insert a clip on the small orifice next to the power button while the laptop is powered off.
  • Boot with Ubuntu Live-USB from USB 3.1 port. I installed Ubuntu in the UEFI mode.
  • Using the installer, I created 2 partitions. (root installation, /home) and perform Ubuntu installation.
  • On reboot, it seems I had no wireless. A simple blacklisting of the ideapad_laptop module, for now, gets things working. "/etc/modprobe.d/blacklist.conf"
  • The dual boot setup is now ready! Upon rebooting, the UEFI boot menu shows options to boot into Linux or windows. With Kernel 4.13 in Ubuntu 17.10, most of the things work out of the box as a laptop. (only fingerprint reader and tilt sensor for tablet mode are not setup out of the box)
  • I haven't yet fiddled around to see if it correctly works in the tablet mode.

Touchpad


I increased the speed, enabled "tap to click", "two finger scrooling". and on gnome-tweak enabled click method to "fingers".

References:

https://www.scrye.com/wordpress/nirik/2017/11/02/lenovo-yoga-920-the-overdetailed-fedora-linux-review/

Friday, December 1, 2017

How to resize a Windows VM image with virt-resize qcow2

Notes

apt install libguestfs-tools virt-manager gnome-boxes

Check for snapshots and delete them:

qemu-img info win10.qcow2
qemu-img snapshot -l win10.qcow2
qemu-img snapshot -d 4  win10.qcow2

 Resize:

qemu-img info win10.qcow2
qemu-img resize win10.qcow2 +23G

List partitions, select partition to get the new size, resize that partition

sudo virt-filesystems -hl -a win10.qcow2
Name       Type        VFS   Label            Size  Parent
/dev/sda1  filesystem  ntfs  System Reserved  500M  -
/dev/sda2  filesystem  ntfs  -                39G   -
/dev/sda3  filesystem  ntfs  -                843M  -

qemu-img create -f qcow2 win10_63G.qcow2 63G
sudo virt-resize --expand /dev/sda2 win10.qcow2  win10_63G.qcow2


References:

https://mike42.me/blog/how-to-resize-a-windows-vm-image-with-virt-resize

Ubuntu 25.04 desktop review and apps to install

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