[SOLVED] Linux Mint Debian Edition 6 on Asus "Transformer Book?" IA32 archetecture 32 bit?

I did what should have been a straight forward install of LMDE6 32 bit, last night. In the live enviroment, booted from ventoy, all the hardware worked just fine, except for the volume, which could be an issue later, but seeing how it just looked like it needed to run the driver wizard tool, and I bet that would work, because it was using a dummy device, I don't "think" that will be an issue.

Unfortunately, I didn't know it's model number, on this one, can't remember where it is, and it failed miserably. The install succeeded with no problems. What failed, is it failed to boot at all, or detect a bootable drive (when the USB is not in it), although the installation succeeded. Without sticking the USB in, it boots to BIOS configuration. With the USB in, it boots to the ventoy, which can be used to reinstall if needed. I don't know what's wrong? I've never seen this behavior before.

Why did I finally decide to install it? Since I've been mostly a daily drive of mint for awhile now, but still finding out about all the programs, which are new to me, not that everything is new, there are a lot I used before, but some are new, when I tried to use windows 10 on this device, seeing what little it was capable of, I just got bored. I could barely browse a web site, without getting bored, and with windows, that's about all I can install of interest anymore on this machine. It's aging a little. I'd hoped I could get it to do roughly what my main desktop pc does, but with a little less horsepower. Like pull documents down from my NAS to read and edit them, and if I wanted, edit some pictures with gimp. Or create a small video with kdenlive.

It's the whole interface as well, I just got bored with. I wanted my virtual desktops where I put them in cinnamon, or one day to have them there, as I fool around with the desktop and get it just how I like it. I wanted the keyboard to be able to come on with a few clicks instead of having to switch to tablet mode, if I didn't want to. Not that I never want to use windows again when I do some work, like on a job, but I wanted to be able to run my bash scripts and stuff too.

I know technically, if you put enough work into it, I might be able to squeeze the abillities out of the windows machine, but it just seemed like, compared to cinnamon, yuk. I hope you even know what I mean. I know if I wanted I could use other window managers/desktop enviroments, but I really like cinnamon. But compared to windows 10, windows 10 is starting to feel like yuk.

So on this machine, I would like to figure out why it's not running mint, when everything looked like it should. I believe I saved earlier images of when it was windows, somewhere, if I just need to restore that. But, I guess, if it can't run cinnamon, it's time to think about restoring, and then letting this hardware go. The hardware is one of my favorite, as far as tablets go (windows tablets by design), but if it can't run cinnamon, its time to think about just letting it go. But I don't think it's that hopeless, I think there's got to be some tricks to it. It is IA32 archetecture, which is not my favorite. This is probably one of the oldest machines (non-servers) I have.

I searched for it on the Internet, and here, and couldn't seem to find what applied to my situation.

By the way, if my main pc was back, i wouldn't be as bored yet. I'm almost ready to go on with my main pc.

Now that i remembered, ill boot this machine from livecd again, and try to find at least my model number, whether inxi, or other means.

Model number as found in system info:

Type: Laptop System: ASUSTeK product: T100TA v: 1.0

I forgot that this was easily possible from my live system.

Now that I have that, I'll do a little more research on my own as well.

Now that I have the model number, I was able to find this:

https://forums.linuxmint.com/viewtopic.php?t=383710

Which made the system boot. Now, I'm having trouble doing the grub install process described here though. It boots, but the menu is now buggy because of that. Please help.

And specifically, how is the menu 'buggy?' Do you have only one hard drive? How many partitions? Which is the LMDE filesystem partition? Which is the EFI partition? Do you have a grub.cfg file on the EFI partition? Does the UUID in that file point to the / filesystem partition? Is it the grub.cfg file on the LMDE filesystem with which you are having problems?

Good questions. The menu is buggy in that, first it errors out, and gives, "press any key". Then, it correctly loads the menu, where it's readable, but has funny "M/R" characters (don't know which ASCII/Unicode code), as the border. Then, after the selection, it goes back to an error, then, "Press any key", again.

This machine has only one SSD. It has 3 partitions, EFI, swap, and /. I let it automatically partition for me. /dev/mmcblk1p3 is root. Occasionally, it seems to be /dev/mmcblk2p3. p1 is EFI.

The grub.cfg location is going to take a bit of explaining: I was able to follow the instructions up to the point of getting the system booted by typing the commands. I had to check where the menu was located with the live system. As soon as I got it booted, I first copied the menu to, "EFI partition/boot/grub". That made it stick so I don't have to enter the commands every time. The menu was buggy from the start, right when typing the commands.

I don't know about the UUID, but booting always behaves the same now.

I typed this from the system, showing that it can, indeed, once booted, behave normally, and it CAN boot now, despite the "bugs".

Got it! I was able to finish the instructions and now, all is good. Let me jump on the bigger laptop for telling my story with it.

OK. Here.

So, the instructions given work perfectly! However, the communication is not quite up to par. So, let me retell the instructions from what also would have been a better path for me.

I'm going to assume that a ventoy bootable iso, was created with a Linux Mint Debian Edition 6 iso on it. I'm also going to assume you are comfortable with windows and linux, including basic windows commands, and linux commands. Just keep the windows knowlege in case you need it. OK?

First, make sure you have secure boot turned off in BIOS. Then, boot from LMDE6 and install properly, the 32 bit iso program. Reboot back into the live enviroment, this clears some stuff, possibly in the live enviroment.

Open a web browser and download the files needed, to the downloads directory. Open a terminal from live enviroment. Mount your newly created root partition, and navigate to a place to put the files you downloaded. Make a copy just in case, not move them.

Then, you need to unmount the drive. Next, mount the efi partition. Copy the files to the root of that, once again. Make folders and move the boot file to the path, "(efi partition)/efi/boot".

Unzip the .7z file to the directory. Copy the grub folder to the parition's root. Remove all extra files and folders from the EFI partition. Find which is your root partition and note it's syntax in grub. Reboot.

Enter the commands for the bootup, using your root as the menufile, the path is /boot/grub/grub.cfg. This will boot the system.

As soon as you boot the system and are logged on, mount the efi partition. Then, copy that file to (efi partition)/grub. Reboot. The menu should now be working every time, but with some bugs.

Boot the system. Then, find your 7z file again, where you put it on root partition, and unzip it again. Open a terminal there. Copy that folder you unzipped to /usr/lib/grub. Run the grub install command. Then the rest of the commands.

All done! Your system should now boot!

P.S. - No menu errors!

Update:

My tablet must be partitioned on both the micro SD card AND the internal storage, in order to work.

So LMDE 6 32 bit created an empty EFI System Partition and that is why it wouldn't boot?
The instructions from the Mint forums should only be needed if you want to install 64 bit LMDE on that machine as it has some 32 bit UEFI

Originally Posted by des_a Update: My tablet must be partitioned on both the micro SD card AND the internal storage, in order to work.

Sounds like my 16 gig internal ssd Dell chromebook P2 that runs antiX.

I used a 54 gig sd card for /home and the internal 16 gig ssd for /.

I can only imagine how fast Mint fills up 16 gig / partition with updates.
I installed 64bit antiX 23.1 runit edition on mine.
Runs real fast.