Hi. I started a thread in newbies, because I am, but I think it's got out of hand and belongs here more. Below is my last post and a link to the original, however the last post below is pretty much the whole bag at the moment and starting from here in this laptop related forum.

I'm quite new to all of this and quite well over my head at this point, I'm techy but don't have a lot of linux experience.

Original post (a lot of irrelevant - I think)
https://www.linuxquestions.org/quest...09#post6254009

Where I'm starting from - Kicking off from the last post in the other thread

Well I just cant get AntiX to run, so have decided to focus on one. Gone with Groovy Gorilla for the time being, and did the full install to the lappy again. Something very very wrong though. Most things do not respond after a very short time, any action seems to look like it's actioning with the whirly gig, and the first one or two do but then it's basically useless.

One of the first actions on the last boot was to open the system monitor just to have a gander at what was rolling around in there, seemed ok... then went to the file system tab (started up on Processes) and saw /dev/nvme / ext4, and /dev/nvme /boot/efi vfat. OK, it's letting me poke around, cool. Then I went to view the resources tab and this is where it stalled, this time. A few actions in to the first instance of something I am trying to use from first boot seems OK. From there it's down hill and will only start to operate after a boot with the first few things tried again. Anything I tend to do seems to result in either a "not responding" dialogue but takes a minute or so to show it, and it seems to buffer those dialogues with every "action" I try and take respectively.

; OR It pretends (or tries at least) to open things, but doesn't appear. I'm sure the process of what ever selected will be running but somehow hanging up. In these instances lets say for example to open firefox to test its operation, it will show firefox in the top left in text as though it's opening with the whirly gig next to it, but disappears after 10-15secs or so and does nothing. I can't view if the process is running because of this problem either, and it's a rather frustrating loop

Strangely the mouse operation is OK, it will let me pull open the applications window to select something, the whole thing hasn't hung per-say, so naturally I want to pop into the terminal to have more of a poke around but the response is the same with anything I try and I'm left a bit stranded. Of course this includes using the terminal to figure out a way forward. Oh and after force quitting the system monitor by dialogue selection this time, it doesn't seem to get rid of the window on screen (screen re-write, not actually force closing... pffft not sure why!?), it's also still open on the apps bar with the orange dot.

This time around with the install, I don't think it has installed the grub and cant seem to manually boot in to it either, but this might be my inexperience with this lot. I can esc in to a manual boot bringing me to the grub> and ls shows me I have (proc) (hd0) (hd0,gpt2) and (hd0,gpt1). So I try set root=(hd0,1) and get grub> and then linux /boot/vmlinuz and tab to complete but finds nothing, or at least leaves me at >linux /boot/vmlinuz on the next line.

Don't forget I am still very green at all this, there has been a of reading, and youtube, and I have little/no support with this. I just wanted to run Linux on this lappy hahahaha. In saying that, I'm enjoying the learning process but right now I'm quite stuck. I think I have done well to get it to where it is at, and hoping some linux loving genius out there reads this and gets interested, and is annoyed as me as to why a machine won't run Linux hardly LOL. Come help me oh gurus! LOL

It also seems to be !chunking! through battery, and I can't seem to boot at the moment where you can see the happenings [ OK ], [ OK ], [ OK ] etc... It's just right in there to the login screen. I'm now clicking the "post quick reply" button ROFL

No shocker. You're running a CPU/GPU combo that REQUIRES the 5.4+ kernel to FUNCTION, and to REALLY work WELL needs the 5.10+ kernel. On a distro that defaults to a 4.19 kernel with a really old version of Mesa that doesn't support that GPU either. If you want to run something based on Debian on that, switch to something based on Testing (bullseye), which will be released in a few months anyway. Bullseyes has a 5.10 kernel and works BEAUTIFULLY on those cpu/gpu combos (Thinkpad L14 4650U & T14 4750U here). In my testing even the backports won't help much, as Mesa still too old to support them.

Or, as you've found, switch to a different distro entirely. *buntu 20.04 with the hwe kernel will work adequately on it. Arch with LTS or current work great. Void will work. I'm sure there's TONS of others, I just only personally use those distro's with any regularity.

1 members found this post helpful.

Thanks so much Tim! I knew it had something to do with the kernel in use and the combo CPU/GFX from the reading I had done so far. Awesome, I think I'll take you up on the Bullseye suggestion, looking forward to Linux working correctly!

Well Tim, I can't thank you enough! This has been 2-3 weeks of bashing my head against a wall, but now... I am now officially logged in to this forum on the laptop in question, running the Debian 11 test distro (17/05/21). It Has complained about a few things but definitely in a position 98% better than what I have ever achieved to date.

Initially it warned during install that the laptop didn't satisfy all of the requirements, and I had to pull the pin on it at the end of the install when it was continually displaying being unable to find (can't quite remember but something, and blocks). Took the risk, manually shut the power down and ever since it has booted ok. It does complain on boot every time about (not fast enough with a camera but will fill this in next boot), but moves through after that fast enough and seems to cope very very well.

It runs beautifully, it's nimble fresh and light feeling, seemingly stable so far and very happy with this step forward/success. Do you know of any kit out there that I could run that might give me a report on what it has problems with in the background/on boot. Would love to have it complain about nothing, but honestly after it's booted it seems to have no issues at all (I just know there are a couple of things not quite right). Thanks!!!

Hahaha right after I posted that it froze on trying to open settings LOL. Rebooted again so gave me the opportunity to take a snap at the thing it has issues with now on boot at least, can also go into settings again, but clearly not 100% yet Still pretty happy with the advance though.

On boot I got a photo which was hard and not super focused but I think the below is all about right, then quickly moves on to booting to the login screen. Anyone have any ideas where to start looking to resolve the following?

[ 1.2462171] ACPI BIOS ERROR(bug): Could not resolve symbol[\SB.PCI10.LPC0.2C0, AE_NOT_FOUND(20200925/dswload2-162)
[ 1.2462361] ACPI ERROR: AE_NOT_FOUND, During name lookup/catalog (20200925/psobject-220)
[ 4.271130] pci 0000:00:00.2 AMD-VI: Unable to read/write to 10MMU perf counter

ACPI errors are QUITE common. Often there's nothing you can do as it's usually a BIOS issue that the manufacturer implemented something that's not ABSOLUTELY following the specifications, and of course unlike on Windows the laptops aren't installing custom drivers with their specifications.

IOMMU you can turn off in BIOS if you don't need it. The PRIMARY (although by no means only) advantage of it with most modern OS's is for running VM's. Otherwise most modern software doesn't need it. This is also an EXTREMELY common issue with Ryzen laptops, and again, is due to the misimplementation in the BIOS by the manufacturer, relying on Windows drivers to cover for incorrect/missing specifications.

First thing to do is make sure that you have the latest BIOS. If manufacturers get enough complaints, they may fix it in their BIOS (this happened on both the Lenovo Thinkpad A485 and the Thinkpad T495). There are SOME that you can specify in the boot line for the IOMMU settings at least (this was the case with my old Dell Inspiron 7375), however it's been a couple YEARS since I've done it and cannot remember exactly which information you need to include.

90% of ACPI errors can simply be ignored, they won't actually affect the day-to-day functionality.

2 members found this post helpful.

Thanks Tim, this thing is golden now, and just installed KDE too and I'm in heaven LOL (had installed Gnome originally, contemplating purge of it but scared I'll break something haha). What a rocket, I wish I had gone to Linux a long time ago, and the flexibility! 😀

Just have to figure out the odd black screen making me have to force shut down occasionally, and the external monitor issue I'm having (another post made for that). Saw a thread the other day regarding the black screen after sleeping which I'll hunt out first before starting anything on that one.

I am very much new to Linux and know nothing about it. But I want to work on linux to learn some of devops projects and have the same laptop as zl3jbb, hence I wanted to ask the following:

1) what is the correct method to install ubuntu/other variant on dell G5 5505?
2) Is the Black Screen problem solvable??
3) If not, how can I avoid or live with it?

Really Thanks to you and F for your efforts.

At this point, there shouldn't be issues on this hardware with Ubuntu anymore, this was an issue a REALLY long time ago, but now just about every supported OS should work fine on this hardware given it's age.