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[russjar]

Hi all,

I hope I've posted in the right place.

I'm trying to install Ubuntu on my GP62 6QF LEOPARD PRO, but everything I've tried the installer hangs and I'm at the end of my tether and I really don't want to used windows!

So has ANYONE managed to install Ubuntu on one of these or similar and what do you do to get around installer locks?

Help

Thanks

[david]

Hi all,

I hope I've posted in the right place.

I'm trying to install Ubuntu on my GP62 6QF LEOPARD PRO, but everything I've tried the installer hangs and I'm at the end of my tether and I really don't want to used windows!

So has ANYONE managed to install Ubuntu on one of these or similar and what do you do to get around installer locks?

Help

Thanks

Hi russjar,

You might not get any help in these user-to-user MSI gaming notebook forums. Hardly anyone here uses Linux and MSI does not support it. You'll probably get better help at an Ubuntu forum from folks who are familiar with it. It might be something simple like disabling boot security in your BIOS. But I don't know ... I'm just a happy Win 7 Ultimate user who never plans to use anything else---except, that is, for the rare use of Win XP in a VM on the same notebook so I can keep PageMaker alive for a little while longer. :-)

Kind regards, David

[russjar]

Hi David,

Thanks for taking th time to reply.

Yeah I guessed I may not get a lot of help here, but thought I'd ask the question anyway. 

I'm still working on my issue, although I have Win10 running on it in the interim, which I've got to say flys.

You're staying on Win7, not taking the upgrade offer? As a little advice, I'd take an image of your current build, take the Win10 free upgrade and once that's done restore back to Win7. This will future proof yourself as once you've upgraded to Win10 you can always rebuld t that down the track and your machine will be licensed and you wont have activation issues. You only have until the end of this month to take the free upgrade to BTW. As for imaging I use Acronis, but there are others out there.

Thanks again

R

[david]

Hi David,

Thanks for taking th time to reply.

Yeah I guessed I may not get a lot of help here, but thought I'd ask the question anyway.

I'm still working on my issue, although I have Win10 running on it in the interim, which I've got to say flys.

You're staying on Win7, not taking the upgrade offer? As a little advice, I'd take an image of your current build, take the Win10 free upgrade and once that's done restore back to Win7. This will future proof yourself as once you've upgraded to Win10 you can always rebuld t that down the track and your machine will be licensed and you wont have activation issues. You only have until the end of this month to take the free upgrade to BTW. As for imaging I use Acronis, but there are others out there.

Thanks again

R

Hi russjar,

I upgraded some of my test-bed systems to Win 10 last year. I use them only for software support. As for the suggestion---no way! After decades as a Windows developer, Microsoft and me are nearing the day when we part company. Win 10 is one of the worst versions of Windows I have seen in a long time and the deception Microsoft is pulling on people should be criminal. Soon your machine will just be a node on their network and you'll be renting Windows. It's the same thing Adobe has done to its customers.

Most customers are too dumb to realize what's going on and how much privacy they're giving up.

Nope! When Win 7 is no longer viable, my entire company walks! And, by the way, it will not be in the direction of Linux or any other Unix derivative.

Kind regards, David

[russjar]

HI Dave

You're a Microsoft developer? Windows OS or Applications?

As for Win10, first I'd be interested to hear your comments on why it's so bad, and secondly in terms of security I've done my best to lock down my Win10 builds. I know MS are monitoring users usage in background services, not good and yes 90% of the end users out there aren't aware.

[register.joeniemand]

For sake of those wanting to help. Can you give a direct link to the exact ubuntu you are using with a download link to download and try install and compare to your problem.

[russjar]

For sake of those wanting to help. Can you give a direct link to the exact ubuntu you are using with a download link to download and try install and compare to your problem.


The versions of Ubuntu I tried are x64 14.04 up through to 16.04.

[shawn.donnelly21]

Hi all,

I hope I've posted in the right place.

I'm trying to install Ubuntu on my GP62 6QF LEOPARD PRO, but everything I've tried the installer hangs and I'm at the end of my tether and I really don't want to used windows!

So has ANYONE managed to install Ubuntu on one of these or similar and what do you do to get around installer locks?

Help

Thanks

Hi,

Are you on windows 10?  I haven't gotten around to installing Linux on my notebook yet, but I know on UEFI systems, on W10, you have to disable Fastboot in power options....when you are in the installer and you say it hangs, how far into it are you getting?  At what point is it hanging?

[russjar]

Hi,

Are you on windows 10?  I haven't gotten around to installing Linux on my notebook yet, but I know on UEFI systems, on W10, you have to disable Fastboot in power options....when you are in the installer and you say it hangs, how far into it are you getting?  At what point is it hanging?

HI how's it going.

Yeah W10 runs well, given I can't get Ubuntu on my system I've had to run with W10 for now. 

So I tried various boot options. EUFI enabled, security disabled, EUFI / CMS enabled, and Legacy boot. Fastboot enabled, Fastboot disabled. They all had the same result. When booting into the live component (Try Ubuntu without installing), on the purple screen where it's loading it starts to load and then hangs. When I tried jumping straight to Install Ubuntu I managed to get it to go through the installer, but on reboot the GUI didn't complete loading and I was left with just a desktop background and a mouse pointer and that's it. 

But I have had to send my laptop back for warranty repairs, I've been having problems with the nvidia graphics so I'm not sure if that's the cause of my issues or it's something else. 

[shawn.donnelly21]

I've gone through the Linux initiation in the past (being a Windows person for most of my life, unfortunately)...My personal experience has been in learning how to correctly dual boot a Windows 10 host machine with Kali Linux 2.0.  I have had similar problems when attempting to install.  As (I think Dave or David is his name) the other poster mentioned, whatever flavor of Linux you're trying to install, there is likely a community, wikipedia page or pages and several videos and other How-To media.  Not trying to send you away...just want to see you solve your issue...especially when it concerns another person learning and using Linux!  :-)

The one other guess I would take....when I was having those aforementioned issues that are similar to yours when trying to install Kali, I was trying to install from a thumb drive....is that the media you're using?  If so, what program or application are you using to create the bootable flash drive installation media?

I found UUI worked the most consistently (as I've done it on a few machines now)...pretty sure that stands for Universal USB Installer)....here's the link:  http://bit.ly/1diZnKQ

Let me know if you have any more questions or issues.  Good Luck!  ;-)

[russjar]

I've gone through the Linux initiation in the past (being a Windows person for most of my life, unfortunately)...My personal experience has been in learning how to correctly dual boot a Windows 10 host machine with Kali Linux 2.0.  I have had similar problems when attempting to install.  As (I think Dave or David is his name) the other poster mentioned, whatever flavor of Linux you're trying to install, there is likely a community, wikipedia page or pages and several videos and other How-To media.  Not trying to send you away...just want to see you solve your issue...especially when it concerns another person learning and using Linux!  :-)

The one other guess I would take....when I was having those aforementioned issues that are similar to yours when trying to install Kali, I was trying to install from a thumb drive....is that the media you're using?  If so, what program or application are you using to create the bootable flash drive installation media?

I found UUI worked the most consistently (as I've done it on a few machines now)...pretty sure that stands for Universal USB Installer)....here's the link:  http://bit.ly/1diZnKQ

Hi,

I'm not dual booting, trying to install Ubuntu as single OS. I was using Rufus to build the USB installation media. I have been using and still do use Ubuntu for at least 6 years but probably longer and this is the first time I've had installation issues.

To dual boot you need to install Windows first. (unless its changed) and yes I am fully aware there is an entire community out there but as I mentioned in a previous post I wanted to ask the question here 'cause you never know...

Thanks for the link to Universal USB Installer, I have used this before.

[shawn.donnelly21]

Sorry I couldn't help you more, bud.

[russjar]

Sorry I couldn't help you more, bud.

Hey no problem thanks anyway. 

[o0magicseven0o]

I think your problem is tied to the NVME SSD. I think you were on the right track as turning off secure boot should allow installation of other OS's.

But ppl have been having alot of difficulty with these new SSD's, such as the Samsung 950.

Try searching for 'install ubuntu on NVMe SSD' and see if you find related solutions.

[russjar]

I think your problem is tied to the NVME SSD. I think you were on the right track as turning off secure boot should allow installation of other OS's.

But ppl have been having alot of difficulty with these new SSD's, such as the Samsung 950.

Try searching for 'install ubuntu on NVMe SSD' and see if you find related solutions

Thanks for the tip,

I will check it out and cross my fingers.

[michaelbollanduk]

Hi i don't know if this is something you are still wanting to do but you need to enable nomodeset in grub on the initial installation

Once ubuntu is installed update to the nvidia propietery drivers as the bug is with the nouveau drivers

[russjar]

michaelbollanduk

Thanks for the info, yeah I haven't been successful with installing Ubuntu on this laptop yet. 

I'll give your suggestion a go and see how I go. 

Thanks again.

[ped]

Hello,

I bought GP62 6QF-678XCZ, because it was the closest one HW-component wise to my wish, plus it was available without Windows
(basically in last 10 years I have very simple task to choose next HW, I set filter to "no OS/linux", and then I pick one of the remaining 3-6 pieces ... makes shopping fast).

I did also ordered to put M.2 SSD inside, and additional RAM to 16GB total (because I work with text editor ... written in Java ... and 8G wasn't really enough :/ (pun on whole Java thing intended, although that "text editor" is full fledged development environment, it's still ridiculous - on the bonus side of thing, I have now gaming-capable machine even if I didn't really wanted to)).

The plan was to install Neon distribution on it, as I prefer KDE, and I have been long time Kubuntu user, but recently the Kubuntu feels sort of abandoned, and Neon is packaged directly by people working on KDE.

First thing was to create bootable USB stick, I did want to use Ubuntu native usb-creator-gtk (or -kde), tried like 7 times with different workarounds, but it always failed on the last step, making the stick bootable (after several minutes of copying files). Then I gave up and used unetbootin - worked first time.

--- here the MSI GP62 6QF gets finally involved ---

Put the USB in, got into BIOS by <DEL> key, did set up legacy, fast boot, SSD as primary boot disk, maybe some more switches which I though were good fit (not sure what is my current BIOS setup, but it was not very much related to my next problems, basically I avoided UEFI as I'm didn't bother to study what exactly is locked with it and how bootloaders have to signed to work with it - and I kept most of the other things to already set values).

Restarted, press <F11> repeatedly to switch boot device to USB mass storage. Got several options, picked to try Neon live... and freezed in couple of seconds. I did try "intall" option directly, worked like one second longer, plus I managed to get into tty1 where I was able to see some logs of system watchdog reporting one core frozen in nouveau ... I somehow recalled that's the open source nVidia driver, and that there this DRM (not digital rights, but Direct Render) thing for last 3-5 years causing sometimes problems.

Another restart, edited the grub line to run Neon live demo by adding "nomodeset" as another parameter (where quiet and splash was) -> this time I got into desktop, and I was able to play around for a while and start the installation.

Installing linux on such overpowered machine (SSD + i5 4-core) is crazy, it took me about 20 minutes to decide how I will partition my disks, then when I finally confirmed it, the installer started to copy the files and meanwhile asked me about my credentials, password ("123456" of course... j/k), keyboard layout, etc... When I was about 80% done with those questions, the installation of files did already finish. (for comparison, when I was installing Kubuntu first time in 2006 on my desktop PC, setting disk partitions took me 20min too, copying started, I finished those other questions in 10min, then it took about another ~20min to finish the installation). After answering the last question, the installer did reconfigure the OS (took another two minutes or so), and I went for restart, this time from SSD disk.

The boot went smoothly into login screen (I think installer did set "nomodeset" for me), I did enter password, and black screen ... Hard power off, second try, this time it worked (or maybe I did add nomodeset manually this time?? I don't recall it).

I did install additional hardware drivers, and set nVidia propietary one, restarted, verified there's no "nomodeset" in grub boot option, and it worked, desktop reachable. Sounds too good? Indeed.

---- stage 2 ----

While looking through dmesg for some signs of some problems, it took roughly 1-5 minutes to get log like:

[ 5316.002772] pcieport 0000:00:1c.0: AER: Corrected error received: id=00e0
[ 5316.002811] pcieport 0000:00:1c.0: PCIe Bus Error: severity=Corrected, type=Physical Layer, id=00e0(Receiver ID)
( https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/linux/+bug/1521173 )

It turns out the Skylake CPU + probably something from RealTek (I think I have card reader, not WiFi) makes "AER" (PCe Advanced Error Reporting) ends with AER errors periodically reported, in case you have lucky combination of CPU+WiFi, it will fill up the log at speed about 50MB/s, making the OS choke quite a lot, or even die. My situation was very subtle compared to that, but I still switched AER completely OFF (by adding "pci=noaer" to grub boot line).

Meanwhile I was testing keyboard, to see how much of meta keys are supported out of box, the keyboard backlight keys working, sound volume too, the extra cooling hw button works! (even when the kernel doesn't recognize it and reports it as unknown scancode e03d ... is it hardwired to the fans or does it have separate controller, or how?). Touchpad on/off, external display and suspend works. But LCD backlight didn't during first few starts, then later it started to work (I think after nVidia driver installation and getting rid of "nomodeset"). Web camera button seems to work (the USB device connects/disconnects, but I have yet to figure out how to get some image from it, didn't focus on that yet). The rest of meta keys "P1" "eco" "H-gears icon" don't do much (although they are mapped to some scancodes, maybe I will hunt them down later and remap to something), the HW button between cooling and power has also unassigned scancode, so it should be possible to map it later and use it for something.

So as I was happy I can finally adjust the LCD brightness, and I did read some notes, the LCD brightness went down, like if I did hit the button. But I did not. I did end at http://askubuntu.com/q/793829/458263 added new file into /etc/X11/xorg.conf.d/10-quirks.conf with suggested content, restart, and yeah, random LCD brightness change events are gone.

-----

That leaves me with maybe "stable" Neon linux OS for the moment (I did saw few more weird things in logs, which I'm planning to address later, like rare WiFi disconnect+connect in 1s, but nothing urgent like OS freeze or changing LCD brightness). Meanwhile I'm installing here all the stuff I need for work, then I will try to customize the desktop (I somehow don't like the default KDE 5.8, it looks sort of nice, but I don't like the colour scheme and for example I can't imagine my father would notice the grayed-out WiFi icon in status bar). Also I need to fix font sizes ASAP, hard to read anything.

And I definitely need to go through the SSD configuration checklist.

My disk partitioning for example (prefers performance over data safety, if you don't backup your data regularly, you should probably opt for less aggressive SSD usage, maybe in some RAID daisy-chain complex config ... I don't mind losing my disk any day without warning (I will lose only 1-2 days of important work and I already learned the personal digital data like photos/etc will not survive long enough to mourn for them), so I'm fine with my setup):

SSD ~270G:
~90G ext4 the root "/", contains all the OS files, including /var/ and so on
~130G ext4 "/home"  ... to store development tools, sources, and compile on it (so the SSD will probably die in couple of years)
~rest is unused to give the SSD wearing some area to play with

HDD ~1TB:
~32G swap
~600G ext4 "/mnt/hdddata", connected from my /home through symbolic links to supply folder "Downloads, Music, Videos, Pictures, games, etc..." where I don't mind slower disk access.
~remaining btrfs "/mnt/hdbtrfs" - not sure why... for some experiments with BTRFS one day maybe... and for temporary local backups

I did try to download + run pre-alpha "System Shock Demo" (the remake one, it has 64b linux binary available) from GOG, on my previous Kubuntu notebook it didn't work (probably due to graphic card), did work OK on MSI + Neon.

I wish the HW guys would slow down a little bit and let the open source drivers to catch up + fix some bugs, as in recent years it feels like the HW gets complicated too fast and the drivers are holding up just so-so (in Windows world), and in linux it's getting again a bit problematic, unless you build specific machine from particular supported components.

[russjar]

thanks for the very detailed and lengthy reply Ped appreciate you taking the time to write this. 

I did read somewhere else that adding nomodeset boot option is a work around, but I haven't had a chance to try a rebuild from windows (which I'm not to happy about running with) to Ubuntu.

[ped]

Finally I migrated all my things to this "new" (wow, took me ~4 months) MSI notebook and started to use it daily and for all the work and entertainment.

No more HW/driver issues popped out at the moment, and the latest KDE5 from neon packages is as instable and crashy, as the KDE5 normally is, so quite solid with few items not working at all. I even managed to report few crashes back into kde bug database, yay.

Linux games (Bastion, Shadow Tactics: Blades of the Shogun, System Shock remake demo, all from GOG) works without any additional effort, performance is notebook-ish, quite good, but gaming desktop with latest GPU would be completely different league. But certainly it works up to my expectations, actually surpassing them a bit.

Live for speed simulator under wine works OK-ish, I expected to have solid 80+ FPS on the new Blackwood track, but it looks as the mobile nVidia 960M in this notebook is actually not that fast. It's still doing great, 50-80FPS, but this old game can cap at 100Hz on serious gaming machine.

Android Studio and development for android ... was the major purpose to buy this beefed up machine ... works quite nice, of course I need to have everything at SSD, without any mirroring, etc, but whole medium-size project can rebuild under 1 minute, which is impressive. Small changes with re-running unit tests only actually sometimes fit under 2 seconds, still abysmal performance when compared to C++ development environment, but this is the first time I see Android studio and JUnit reaching times counter in single seconds, not tens of them.

Basically nothing more to say about linux-specific things, it just works, once you get through the installation and set it up correctly. Already went through two major updates of KDE5 plasma desktop environment, and one security update of kernel itself, and so far everything works (including the quirks described in previous post, so I still have to block the random brightness events, and live distribution will boot up only with "nomodeset", etc... none of that bothers you once you have the OS installed and configured).

CONS:

I had already opportunity to work on battery only, and the expected time of 2 hours surprised me a bit, then I though it's just after boot, so it should settle down to something more reasonable. And indeed, after 10 minutes of work it settled to 1:40 ... Yeah, the battery in this notebook vs linux 4.4 core+KDE5+Java... is not up to it, if you plan to use it while traveling, make sure you have power outlet available very often, battery is just back-up option for desperate (short) times.

And whoever is designing keyboard layout, I don't like you very much. The layout is actually not bad, quite close to what I'm used to from the HP notebooks, but few things annoying me a bit:
- insert/delete in upper right corner next to PgUp/PgDown, and Home/End combined into Page buttons through "Fn", while Scroll lock/pause+break are separate. I would love to have home/end instead of insert/delete, and insert/delete above backspace, and move scroll lock/pause to them through "fn" key (not sure where to put break, I don't need that one, but maybe another "fn" on new "home"?).
- Enter is not big one, the upper half is "\|" key, I prefer the big one. But ok, they are like this.... but then why there is another "\|" (actually writes "<>" in my current layout, but never mind) key next to space bar, and there's no "properties" key at all? For programmers one "\|" would be enough, and properties are sometimes missing, when working in file manager, etc..
- the long "`~" on left top, I'm used that the "1" is a bit more on the left, took me some time to get used to this, already I'm quite ok, hitting 1 most of the time, but in the beginning I did hit ` most of the time. Making a bit shorter "`~" and shorter backspace would allow for another key at the right top corner, like "\|" from enter. That would be OK for me, I hit the backspace on the right edge any way.

That said, the keyboard feels quite nice to touch, and I can remap it almost freely in the linux config, so I'm still considering remapping + either let the labels be simply wrong, or put some tape over the keys with remapped keys.

At the moment I'm almost-happy with the MSI notebook, may turn into very-happy if it will work for about 3+ years without a hitch.

[ped]

One more note, if you are android developer, and you plan to run latest Android Studio... take 16GB RAM for sure.

But actually right at this moment I didn't went over 6.5G RAM used, while on older notebook with 8G RAM I went into swap even during the first day after boot, or at least in 2-3 days of running. With the latest KDE5 it looks like they did fix some serious leaks, also on Android studio side, because right now it looks like 8G would be so-so enough. I guesstimate the desktop takes at least 200-300MB less after some usage, and doesn't leak another +100M daily.

 Still if you plan to run also the emulator, 16G is obvious choice, should be safe also for future, at least for few months.

 I can recommend MSI gaming machine with 16G and M.2 SSD disk to every Android developer, doing your text editing on such machine is actually lagging and jerking only minimally, sometimes it even feels as fast as old era IDEs from Pascal/C times. Also you can play most of the new games, although you just wanted machine for text editing...

[russjar]

For sake of those wanting to help. Can you give a direct link to the exact ubuntu you are using with a download link to download and try install and compare to your problem.

Hi 

Ubuntu Desktop https://www.ubuntu.com/download/desktop

and I've also tried Ubuntu Mate https://ubuntu-mate.org/download/