Installing Mint 18 MATE on an N3050 Acer Cloudbook

[VirtualLarry]

OK, I got Linux Mint 18 MATE 64-bit installed on my Acer Cloudbook's internal eMMC and am booting off of it.

You need to set a BIOS (TPM?) password, in order to be allowed to disable Secure Boot. You also need to set boot to "Legacy" (from "UEFI"), and set Trackpad to "Basic" rather than "Advanced".

Prepare a USB flash drive with the Linux Mint 18 MATE 64-bit ISO, using Rufus in "dd mode".

Power off the system, plug the USB flash drive into the right USB2.0 port, and power on. Hit F12 repeatedly until you get the boot menu. Select the flash drive.

I had issues booting Mint with the default settings, it would kernel panic error about no APIC.

So, I had to press SPACE while booting, and select "Compatibility Mode" to boot.

Then, when booted, start the installer. You'll need to connect to the internet wirelessly to do the install.

When prompted by the installer, select "erase entire drive and install Mint", and when prompted, unmount the eMMC so the installer can re-partition / re-format it.

I had some issues with restarting when done, I had to force power-off. Also, I've had issues restarting after the initial update session.

I had to edit the GRUB options, and insert "noapic" as a kernel boot parameter. Then it boots OK.

 

[TeknoBug]

I found Mint 18 to be very unstable, it's basically a modified Ubuntu 16.04 and I put it off until they actually make it Linux Mint rather than a hackjob.

 

[VirtualLarry]

I found Mint 18 to be very unstable, it's basically a modified Ubuntu 16.04 and I put it off until they actually make it Linux Mint rather than a hackjob.

Funny, I read something similar complaining about Ubuntu 16.04 being very unstable for an LTS release.

 

[lxskllr]

Funny, I read something similar complaining about Ubuntu 16.04 being very unstable for an LTS release.

I haven't upgraded yet. For an upgrade, they recommended waiting for the .1 release this month. I think that's due to the switch to systemd. I don't feel like dicking around on my work machine, so I'm waiting. Maybe that's the cause of some people's issues.

 

[TeknoBug]

Funny, I read something similar complaining about Ubuntu 16.04 being very unstable for an LTS release.

Yes I avoid Ubuntu in general because they slap on the newest software possible, which often leads to some instability. I installed 16.04 on a spare drive to see what the fuss about Unity8 was and I counted 6 segfaults the first time upon logging into it. Mint 17.3 is more stable because it's based on an older build, but Debian is just a lot more stable and the distro to go with if you're after longevity.

However with Skylake, Ubuntu has the most amount of support for that hardware so far.

 

[TeknoBug]

I just threw the official Mint 18 release on my 40GB Intel SSD (yeah tiny I know) and installed the new KDE plasma via ppa, and boy oh boy I'm loving the new KDE.

No issues so far with the release of Mint 18 compared to the beta.