Linux on a Acer Aspire ES15

What? A tutorial about installing linux on a laptop? There are so many tutorials why make another one?
Well this wasn't a regular linux install... This was suffering

Background

So I've inherited my mother's Acer Aspire with 4G of RAM and a 1.1GHz Celeron.
It had Windows 10 and it was so slow.
I am always saying that Linux can run on a potato so lets put the best OS on it and see it go!
little did I knew the hell I was about to face

Regular installations

I tried to install Debian on it, but it failed on the installation of grub.
Then tried installing arch and mint and tried Grub alternatives like rEFInd but none of them worked, so I started searching.

And oh my God, I did not found what I wanted
Well this might be the best tutorial
This guy even made a doc

But my approach was a little different. First I hoped this could be a BIOS problem and updating it could solve my problems.

Updating the BIOS

I went to the acer website and downloaded the latest bios updater
I ran the executable and got the error minimum battery 25%. 7% < 25%
Ok no problem I'll let it charge through the night, and then I install it.

24 hours later the battery was at 5%

well shit

I saw a lot of threads and by piecing them together I found out a workable solution.

I downloaded the executable, extracted it, then duplicated the platforms.ini and renamed the copy to platform.ini. In the two files I went to the AC_Adapter section and changed Flag to 0, BatteryCheck to 0, BatteryBound to 1.

Now I prayed for the lights not to go out and ran the H2OFFT-W.exe not the B5W1A119.exe

And it worked!

Now with the latest version of the BIOS lets install linux!

It failed once again.

Well at least I have the most up-to-date BIOS now...

Installing linux

I read this tutorial a lot, and it seems like the boot entries are read only so, or you boot for the original windows installation or fuck you.

But I thought if I can boot from any flash drive independent of the operating system it has then could I install only the EFI partition on a USB drive and the Root partition on disk?

So that's what I tried. I made a regular arch install flowing the wiki and in the grub install I ran this command

grub-install --target=x86_64-efi --efi-directory=/boot/ --bootloader-id=GRUB --no-nvram --removable  

And it worked!

I can't believe it. It only took one week and sacrificial pen drive to get a miserable 4G, 1.1Ghz cheap laptop to run arch linux
Well at least now I have bragging rights...

Future plans

Maybe I'll turn it into a NAS to have true backups of my data and not just a cold storage.