cant get any distro working on medion atom netbook
 

tried

lubuntu
ubuntu
puppy
zorin

and a few others

just hits a black screen somewhere during installation

do distros not run well on atom cpu

some moan about kernel support for x86_64 and this is an i686
but its def 32bit i downloaded

any ideas?

sigint-ninja,

See if you have better luck with 32 bit antiX-16.1, which I have on a Samsung N220 netbook:
http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...ok-4175597832/

antiX-16.1 is based on Debian:
http://antix.mepis.org/index.php?title=Main_Page

Download the 32 bit antiX-16.1_386-full.iso:
http://antix.mepis.org/index.php?tit...Page#Downloads

antiX-16 FAQs:
http://download.tuxfamily.org/antix/...FAQ/index.html

To enable wifi after installation:

Menu > Control Centre > Network > Network Interfaces (ceni) > wlan0 > follow wizard and give SSID/network name and wifi password.

Depends on the atom. cmoov or some opcode missing on older ones. Debian normally works for me. Perhaps try a 32 bit distro to avoid the issue, but not really ideal as you'll lack things that route. My dads old atom laptop crashed on ubuntu, doing a dd, but mostly worked. I installed debian on that thing and it was solid. Although not a very useful machine with only 1GB ram, by modern standards.

Edit: My dads laptop was definitely 64 bit. And a bit surprised how well it's wifi worked out of the box on debian.

There are a lot of Medion notebooks out there, so the model would be helpful here.

Medion has notebooks which use the ATOM Bay Trail processor.

I run an older Intel Atom N270 notebook using Debian and Mint Cinnamon Debian Edition and it works fine. The key there being Debian roots versus Ubuntu. I have found that normal Mint, which is Ubuntu based does not work on it.

sigint-ninja,

Posts #3 and #4 suggest that the bootloader is effectively locked:
http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...op-4175597580/

More info:
http://unix.stackexchange.com/questi...i-only-machine

More optimism here:
http://askubuntu.com/questions/39271...i-boot-support

Debian support for mixed mode systems (64-bit system with 32-bit UEFI):
https://wiki.debian.org/UEFI

The Debian netinst mixed-arch .iso was used apparently:
http://talk.gtalug.narkive.com/h2uRs...or-32-bit-uefi

Details and download:
https://cdimage.debian.org/debian-cd...i-arch/iso-cd/

Some of those atoms have a goofy loader. A number of web pages tell how to get linux up using either 32 to 64 bit loader or reverse (I forget)

I have a HP Mini with a N450. I installed Slackware 64 bit on it. Everything works as expected. The track point was a little tricky to get working.

I upgrade the memory to 2 gig, removed the 120 gig HD, and put a 249 gig SSD in it. The system boots in about 30 seconds and is a very nice travelling laptop.