Lenovo IdeaPad S205
Overview
The Lenovo IdeaPad S205 has some issues with the BIOS (Boot loader), WiFi.
Hardware
The unit used for testing contained the following hardware:
- Processor: AMD E-450 APU (integrated Mobility Radeon HD6320)
- WiFi: Ralink RT3090
BIOS
The IdeaPad uses a BIOS based on the SecureCore Tiano Platform. It supports UEFI and Legacy booting, but you can't manually switch between them. From what I found out it depends wether the disk is partitioned as GPT or MBR. However it doesn't have secure boot.
The BIOS firmware has got a lot of bugs. If anything related to it doesn't work, try loading setup defaults.
Installation
Follow the Installation guide until bootloader installation.
You can not use the GUID Partition Table and still boot using legacy BIOS. If your desired partition layout doesn't work for MBR you must use UEFI.
UEFI
While installing the bootloader, you might get the error
Failed to create EFI Boot variable entry: No space left on device
leaving you with an un-bootable system. Don't worry too hard about this error!
The BIOS wants the .efi
-file to be specificly /boot/efi/EFI/boot/bootx64.efi
The BIOS does not seem to be able to boot any other file, thus giving you the above error message.
The trick is now to just copy /boot/efi/EFI/arch/grubx64.efi
to /boot/efi/EFI/boot/bootx64.efi
$ cp /boot/efi/EFI/arch/grubx64.efi /boot/efi/EFI/boot/bootx64.efi
and reboot into your system.
WiFi
Drivers work out of the box.
If you're using UEFI, your device might show up as hard blocked. This is due to a bug in the BIOS firmware. You can fix it by doing the following things:
- Go into BIOS settings and reload factory defaults
- If WiFi still doesn't work change the boot order so that it boots from PXE (PCI LAN) before booting from Hard Drive.
Touchpad
Works by installing the xf86-input-synaptics package.
Sound
Detected by ALSA automatically.
Graphics
The open source xf86-video-ati driver works fine and is recommended.
You can also install the proprietary Catalyst driver, but it causes glitches when waking up from hibernation. Also you may run into errors when using the HDMI output on some Monitors.