Linux Installation of Ubuntu 17.04 on MSi Laptops

[ragnarok1968]

I've been reading around alot about folks having massive issues with trying to install Ubuntu period. Whether dualboot or clean install doesn't seem to matter. I'm so stubborn, I look into stuff until I get an answer

So this evening, I ran into instructions meant for either dualboot installs or clean and it seemed straight forward but it worked!

Ok, how I got 17.04 installed for future reference:
I first set my BIOS to turn off secure boot
Set Boot to UEFI and not CSM
Set TPM to 2.0 mode with 1.x compatibility mode TPM mode setting is for if you plan to self encrypt your drive. (I didn't) I set it anyway.
pretty straight forward but it worked like a charm. Many people are having issues with MSi Laptops and Ubuntu

I own an MSi GT72VR-6RE dominator pro and it worked for me. But the settings seem to be universal and work for MSi laptops in general turn off Secure boot.
Set your Bios to UEFI only and DO NOT mess with CSM whatsoever..
Set your TPM mode to 2.0 but with 1.x compatibility..
I booted to the live DVD and then installed via the desktop installation method. Naturally I had my reservations but they were quelled upon reboot.

 

[BIGBEARJEDI]

Good to know, Ragnar! This is very good information. I've been fooling around with Ubuntu, as well as other versions of dual-boot Linux/Windows systems (mostly Linux-W10), and I've gotten a Ubuntu v16.0.4LTS & W10 dual-boot to work well on multiple test machines here.
I haven't yet tried v17.04 as I didn't know it was available yet. I haven't had too many problems installing it over the years; but what I have noticed is quirky things like the drives with dual-boot Linux & W10 after leaving them shut off for several days on my test machine, when I come back the multiboot doesn't work right and either the Ubuntu is scrambled or the W10 is scrambled and I have to restore my disk image from my Macrium backup or completely rebuild it. I'm still doing that from a trip I made back in June. I had to rebuilt both my Mint-W10 dual-boot drive and my Ubuntu-W10 dual-boot drive. My test PC is quite old; 10 years old last month; a Dell Dimension E520. I have 5 drives in this machine including the Ubuntu & Linux dual-boot drives. Only 3 can be physically hooked up to the SATA Motherboard connection simultaneously. I'm really not sure why this happens on this particular PC; it's the most stable test box I have and I do most of my W10 testing on it.

A couple of things I discovered along the way of building this setup include the big one. You never want to install your Ubuntu (or any Linux) on a bare drive first, and then add in W10! That hasn't worked well for me on a variety of machines, not just the Dell PC. So, for other folks running into problems with Ubuntu installs, especially in dual-boot mode is that you should always do the install from the LiveCD to a working W10 machine (or other older windows version) in that fashion. This works best. It also applies to laptops and netbooks (Sony & Acer Aspire) which I've also installed Ubuntu on over the years. We've had several questions the last couple of years on this process, and I had asked our Admins to make a special sub-forum for people attempting this dual-boot Linux-Windows configuration. To date, it hasn't happened. Probably because they are so busy, and we only get a handful of these questions each year.

Another thing that's worth mentioning, is that once you have your dual-boot setup running on a machine, make sure that you run SPEEDTEST.NET and check your Internet speed. When I installed Ubuntu on the Acer netbook with W10, I discovered quite by accident that I was only getting 14-18Mbps download speed on the unit. Being that my ISP, Spectrum is giving me 65Mpbs everywhere else on my network, I thought that was odd, and attributed it to the underpowered processor on the netbook. After fooling around with it for a few months, I decided to wipe the drive and just reinstall with a W10 stand-alone image I had for the netbook. And voila: the speed jumped back up to 22-23Mbps! Still not 65, but much better. That gave me pause for thought. The Ubuntu had severely throttled down my Internet speed for some reason. Wiped the drive again, and this time did a scratch Ubuntu install from LiveCD, and had the same 14-18Mbps slower speed. This netbook couldn't achieve a decent speed with Ubuntu loaded in either dual-boot mode or even by itself. W10 however, had no such problem.
This could be an isolated instance, but some of the other guys here have seen similar results on their machines. It seems to be limited to netbooks, tablets, and laptops with Celeron CPUs or Mobile Celerons however. No such speed throttling seems to exist on any of the several desktop PCs I've tested (Dell, HP, Acer/Gateway).

This isn't directly related to your Ubuntu install settings advice, but it might be if someone has never installed Ubuntu before or attempting to do a dual-boot setup. For anyone reading this, it might prove helpful. Also, the Ubuntu I used on the Acer netbook was v14.04.4, as the v16.0.4 version wouldn't work. I suspect neither will this newest v17.04 version.

Good post.
<<BIGBEARJEDI>>

 

[ragnarok1968]

just off the hip @BIGBEARJEDI , install Windows 10 first to establish your boot sector or is it MBR? Then install Ubuntu afterwards. I lost the website where I got the info but archived it here, for those who wish to install Ubuntu only.

The site DID state to ALWAYS install Windows 10 first for a dual-boot system.

 

[ragnarok1968]

check that last post, I have a hard copy and when I get my wireless scanner, I'll scan it into digital format and put it here.

 

[ussnorway]

So this evening, I ran into instructions meant for either dualboot installs or clean and it seemed straight forward but it worked!

what version of Ubuntu did you install?

edit nevermind I see the
Ubuntu 17.04

 

[ragnarok1968]

yeah.. 17.04

 

[ragnarok1968]

@ussnorway - can we sticky this? this might come in handy later for someone

 

[Neemobeer]

The tpm doesn't come into play unless you're using full disk encryption that can use the TPM such as Windows bitlocker. Windows 7 doesn't support TPM in 2.0 mode it's needs to be switched to 1.2 mode which most manufacturers have utilities to switch the mode. Most Linux distros work fine with secure boot and UEFI boot. They don't play well with Intel fast boot though.

Side note on Ubuntu versioning Ubuntu releases always come out every year in April and October and the version numbers are in the format YY.MM so version 17.04 came out in April of this year and the next version 17.10 is released this October.

 

[ragnarok1968]

18.xx is coming out next year sometime. so appears according to Neemobeer's saying, MS stole the naming convention from Ubuntu's number scheme.. Windows 10 works the same way 1703 = YY/MM

 

[nmsuk]

Every April and October.

 

[BIGBEARJEDI]

just off the hip @BIGBEARJEDI , install Windows 10 first to establish your boot sector or is it MBR? Then install Ubuntu afterwards. I lost the website where I got the info but archived it here, for those who wish to install Ubuntu only.

The site DID state to ALWAYS install Windows 10 first for a dual-boot system.

>>>My understanding is that M$ has copyright protection code in BOTH the boot sector, and the MBR which lies inside the boot sector in the first 512 bytes of the boot sector. Since clever hackers were able to figure this out in W7 and bypass it, M$ has also added ADDITIONAL copyright protection code elsewhere within Track 0 of the hard drive of any PC where W10 is installed. They began doing this sometime around the release of W7 SP1; c. late 2009 early 2010. It also shows up in W8x & W10 of course. It's actually there in the earliest Tech Preview versions dating back to 2014 as well. If you can find the website link for the Ubuntu information, that's great. No rush I believe, as I said we don't have enough of these Linux dual-boot questions to get our own sub-forum, but if we do, you should be included in it! <<<

Have a Great Week!
BBJ

 

[Neemobeer]

It's not possible to block writing to any sector on a hard drive unless you have a hardware write blocker which are only used for digital forensics.

There is a protective MBR which is written when a disk is formatted to GPT. The only purpose this serves is to allow a legacy MBR installer to detect a MBR partition of 2TB in size. You can still certainly overwrite this and install something that doesn't understand GPT.

 

[ragnarok1968]

Well a workaround to this fiasco is to install your multi boot Os'es in this order Windows 10 > Ubuntu or whatever flavor linux suits you.

Q: which begs me to ask.. If M$ isn't careful, if they purposely prevent other OS'es from being installed on future systems, I'd be thinking that could cross over into anti-trust/ anti competition practises?

But as it stands, we can STILL safely install opposing OS'es but I can confirm on this new MSi laptop, I have to shutdown fastboot and change the TPM to 2.0 with compatibility with 1.x (not 1.0)

 

[Neemobeer]

There is only TPM 1.2 and 2.0. A little more digging TPM may come into play Looks like kernel v4.11 has better support for TPM 2.0 mode.

Also you technically can install Windows and Linux distros in any order. There are just a few extra steps involved if you install Linux first.

• Leave space for Windows obviously
• Install Windows
• Boot into a live disc or usb
• chroot to the installed system
• Re-install grub and run update-grub
• Done

 

[BIGBEARJEDI]

Well a workaround to this fiasco is to install your multi boot Os'es in this order Windows 10 > Ubuntu or whatever flavor linux suits you.

Q: which begs me to ask.. If M$ isn't careful, if they purposely prevent other OS'es from being installed on future systems, I'd be thinking that could cross over into anti-trust/ anti competition practises?
>>>Well, that's unlikely to happen, if nothing else due to the tremendous number of lawyers and law firms employed by Microsoft. They certainly have the largest legal counsel of any tech firm on the planet and with good reason. Decades ago, Bill Gates was quoted in his Biography "Hard Drive" as saying that if they didn't have at least a dozen or two dozen lawsuits going in any given year, that they weren't doing their job properly.
Not to mention there is a ton of case law (and I'm not an Attorney) from the many M$ wins over the years. One of the big ones I'm reminded of harkens back to the early years of PCs in the mid-80s when Motorola tried to sue Microsoft for designing DOS and later Windows to ONLY work on Intel processors and not Motorola processors which were heavily used by Apple in their machines (notably the Mac), and a host of other PCs such as Commodore, Amiga, TRS-80 (Radio Shack) etc. If that wasn't clear Anti-trust manipulation, I don't know what was; but M$ prevailed due to the plethora of talented lawyers who not only blocked Motorola's suit but somehow got them to pay damages to Microsoft on the Countersuit. Unless the Government is willing to do a forced breakup of their monopoly; such as the great divestiture of AT&T, it's probably never going to happen IMO.<<<
<<BBJ>>

But as it stands, we can STILL safely install opposing OS'es but I can confirm on this new MSi laptop, I have to shutdown fastboot and change the TPM to 2.0 with compatibility with 1.x (not 1.0)

>>>Good to know! <<<
<<BBJ>>

 

[ragnarok1968]

As of this writing, some things happened to my laptop. Someone attacked my laptop and destroyed the PCI-E SSD drive. They hit it with malware and it died. I thought I lost my mobo but after a week of it just sitting there and me brainstorming this or that and I thought to try and remove hardware. I needed to only remove the SSD drive, since nothing would install anymore, but removing the SSD and using the 1GB 2.5" HDD in there now as the main system drive. It's slow.. but the system still works until I can replace the emtpy PCI-E SSD slot filled with a newer SSD.

But Ubuntu 18.04 LTS is running like a champ. I have finally been able to extract myself off of Windows since I have software on my Ubuntu system that I needed or used on Windows. I even connected my 24" flatscreen TV to the HDMI port for more real estate.

But that's an update...

 

[chihwah]

Hello, I have been running Ubuntu 18.04 also. It really works well. I installed a lot of security programs linux as well to protect myself: UFW firewall, Snort, portsentry,etc. Running FL studio 20 perfectly with Playwithlinux, Wine frontend. Linux boots very fast on SSD: about 20 seconds. XFCE GUI. I am leaving my windows 7 behind and staying with linux now. It has be become time to switch as of Ubuntu 18.04.

Edit:
Laptop X230 Tablet. I noticed that Linux identifies usb 2.0 LAN devices without installing driver. Windows 7 requires driver. It's just a minor thing, but I find linux much more plug and play. Windows is like plug and pray....

 

[Simplivllc]

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