UEFI Debian on the Acer Aspire R13

Debian UEFI Hardware Linux

Lighter, thinner and all round more power has always been what you want in a laptop. The ability of engineers to compress so much processing power into such light and compact units these days is remarkable.

Needing a new workhorse I did a little research and liked the look of the Acer Aspire R 13. I’d never purchased an Acer before, but the pioneering design and list of features ticked the boxes I was after.

The research didn’t locate any evidence of how Linux might run on it, but I decided to take the punt anyway. I was so impressed with the result that I felt it warranted public acknowledgement (though it took me 4 months to publish).

There were a few tricky bits, but once the latest weekly snapshot of Jessie was installed, everything worked perfectly. I was blown away by what the Debian team has achieved, and quite impressed to see the platform so healthy on hardware that had been released a little more than a month earlier.

Tricky Steps required for install

  • Resize/Shrink C: using diskpart or disk manager (ntfsresize could also work in theory)
  • BIOS (Fn F2) navigate to security section
  • All required options are greyed out until the supervisor password is set
  • Only after the password is set, can Secure boot be removed from UEFI
  • Secure boot will otherwise prevent the install media from loading
  • UEFI rather than legacy mode is necessary for dual booting the preloaded Windows
  • Enable the boot menu in the boot section of the bios (disabled by default)

I used a USB DVD ROM and the weekly Debian builds for the install.

The wifi requires non-free firmware, which can be loaded via USB after extracting the ucode files from firmware-iwlwifi package.

After carving up the freed space into boot, swap & root, I selected the existing EFI partition (part2) and set use as EFI System Partition. This creates a new Debian subfolder of the EFI System partition folder and adds grubx64.efi.

Boot time of 4-5 seconds from grub to login. Other than the wifi firmware listed above, everything just works with zero effort.

Yay Debian!