Installing Ubuntu 11.10 on Lenovo Z570

I've been running Ubuntu as my primary OS for several years now, and have been loving every minute of it! Today, I received a new laptop for work, a Lenovo Z570. You can imagine my excitement, pulling back the plastic and booting things up.

Of course, the first thing I do is setup the laptop as Dual Boot Win7/Ubuntu. Turns out, several of the Lenovo laptop have a crappy implementation of the EFI Boot system. This means that simply popping in a cd and clicking a few buttons does not leave you with a dual booting system. Even worse, re-partition the entire hard drive, and you are left with a system that won't boot.

All of that said, it took me an entire evening and a TON of Google'ing to figure this one out. I thought I would lay this one out for anyone else who is unfortunate enough to be in the same situation.

Step 1: Install Ubuntu. Perform the basic install, resizing the Windows partition accordingly. Once the install is complete, the system will reboot and you will be full of joy to discover that you have no way to boot to Ubuntu. Turns out, the way Lenovo has things setup, grub does not get installed with Ubuntu.

Step 2: Install Grub. Pop the Ubuntu cd back into your drive and reboot to the Ubuntu Live CD. Press Ctrl+Alt+T to open a terminal and type the following:


sudo -i
mount /dev/sda6 /mnt
mount /dev/sda1 /mnt/boot
grub-install --root-directory=/mnt/ /dev/sda


mount --bind /proc /mnt/proc
mount --bind /dev /mnt/dev
mount --bind /sys /mnt/sys
chroot /mnt update-grub
umount /mnt/sys
umount /mnt/dev
umount /mnt/proc
exit

Restart your laptop and you will find the happy little Grub running, but Ubuntu is still not a boot option!

Step 3: Install Ubuntu in Grub. Reboot your laptop back to the Ubuntu Live CD. Press Ctrl+Alt+T to open a terminal and type the following:

sudo -i

mkdir /media/ubuntu

mkdir /media/winBoot

mount /dev/sda6 /media/ubuntu

mount /dev/sda1 /media/winBoot

cp /media/ubuntu/boot/grub/grub.cfg /media/winBoot/grub/grub.cfg

Restart your laptop and boot into all of the Linux Goodness. There is just one problem, no WiFi!

Step 4: Fix your WiFi. This laptop suffers from MWP (Multiple Wifi Personalities), as well as a glitch in the Bios. Press Ctrl+Alt+T to open a terminal and type the following:

sudo -i

modprobe -r acer-wmi

cd /etc/modprobe.d

gedit /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist.conf

When the editor opens, add "blacklist acer-wmi" as a new line at the end of the file. Save and exit Gedit. Back at the terminal type the following:

rfkill list all

If you see any "Hard blocked: yes" entries, you have one of three things going on. Either your physical wifi switch is in the off position (Look at the front right portion of the keyboard), your software switch is off (Fn+F5), or you need to reset your Bios. For me, it took reseting my Bios to fix it. Restart your laptop and press F2 at boot up. Once in the Bios, press F9 to reset the Bios followed by F10 to save and exit.


Aside from these major but temporary setbacks, I am pretty impressed with the laptop. As I come across new issues, I'll keep everyone informed.

Many thanks to the MANY websites & blogs I had to scour to finally find the appropriate answers for my Ubuntu Woes. Thank you blogs.scienceforums.net for putting me in the right direction on the dual boot issue. Also, @Venkat with askubuntu.com, thanks for bringing back my WiFi... I was seriously going through Internet withdrawals!

Anyway, I hope this information can ease you open source pains!