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Installing linux on Acer Aspire X3995

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  • 18-07-2013 9:41am
    #1
    Dermot Illogical
    Registered Users Posts: 3,131 ✭✭✭


    I thought I'd share my experience of removing Windows 8 and replacing it with Mint on an Acer Aspire X3995.
    I wouldn't normally go for anything made by Acer, but the price was reasonable and I was in a hurry.

    Anyway, I wanted to remove Windows 8 even before I met it. Interacting with it only strengthened my desire. So I got myself a 64bit version of Linux Mint and put it on a USB stick using Unetbootin.
    I went to the UEFI settings in Win8 and booted to the BIOS where I switched off secure boot.

    Now I was able to boot from the USB stick, run Mint live and install it if I chose.
    I installed it about 20 times, with various different settings, but could not get it to boot post-install. I tried setting the HDD up as msdos instead of gpt. No dice.

    It turns out the BIOS the Acer ships with (P11.A3) supports Win8 ONLY. For that alone I could slap the head off the muppet who designed it.
    There is a BIOS on the Acer site which supports Linux.
    So I downloaded that and extracted it to a FreeDOS USB stick created with unetbootin again.

    I followed the instructions for the BIOS upgrade only to be met with "Error! ROMID is not compatible with existing BIOS ROMID".

    Acer use afudos.exe to install firmware, and it's passed parameters by the batch file it's called from.

    Here's what the batch file looks like.
    @echo off
    afudos ..\ROM\P11-A3L.CAP /P /B /N /R
    @echo off

    afudos has another switch "/X", which stops it doing a ROMID lookup. I edited the batch file to include it and it worked.
    @echo off
    afudos ..\ROM\P11-A3L.CAP /P /B /N /R /X
    @echo off

    So I set up my disk in gparted as an msdos disk one last time, installed Mint and it went as smooth as could be. Post-install it booted and all is well with the World.


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