Ubuntu on the Acer V Nitro VN7-792G-79LX

This thread is for my experiences so far with Ubuntu (and Debian) on the Acer V Nitro VN7-792G-79LX.

Background:

As soon as Skylake machines started being released I began looking at possible Linux machine candidates. My qualifications:

• Quad core
• 16GB+ ram
• 4+ hours battery life
• IPS display
• Option to run on integrated graphics only under Linux
• Good keyboard
• Thunderbolt 3 port (or docking station connector)

We have many good options available right now that fit these parameters. Everything right now will have some small teething issues (except maybe business machines that come pre-installed with Linux, but even those aren't immune to problems). So why the Acer V Nitro series? Well, it is most attractive to me due to its price. At ~$900 on sale its inexpensive enough that most people can afford it, while its specifications are closer to something you would pay $300 more for. So how well does it work with Linux? Very well, actually!

Dual boot setup:

This was, by far, the hardest part to get setup. I have heard that Acer's UEFI implementation was less than stellar, and after being used to working with Dell and HP business machines and the configuration of this machines bios took a few tries before I had something that worked and did not get modified when rebooting into Windows.

F2 at boot will enter the bios. Once you are inside it, set a supervisor password to enable modification of Secure Boot mode and other options. F12 can be optionally enabled at boot to allow you to select a boot device. I ended up disabling Secure Boot as I initially wanted to run Debian Jessie (which does not support Secure Boot), however you may be able to leave this enabled if you just want to run Ubuntu.

I booted into the crufty Windows 10 installation, created an Acer restore disk (this took over an hour, BTW), then created a vanilla Windows 10 usb install drive using Microsoft's media creation tool. I then shut the machine down, removed the palm rest, and swapped the 1TB HDD for a 500GB SSD. After re-assembling the machine I booted the Microsoft Windows 10 installation disk, leaving ~100GB for my Linux installation. There is a good guide over in the other section on the forums here to getting a clean Windows 10 installation going.

After Windows 10 was installed (and updated) I began my Linux installation. I am using Ubuntu Gnome 15.10, 64-bit. The installer must be booted with the "nouveau.modeset=0" parameter or else the live installer will be very unstable and eventually randomly reboot. After booting the live installer I began the installation. I created a ~90GB ext4 partition and ~8GB swap partition, and let ubuntu add grub to the efi partition Windows had created.

After reboot, I needed to go back into the bios, re-enable Secure Boot, then under the Secure Boot specific menu option, chose the "Add a trusted boot option" or similar (I will try to take a photo of this in the bios later). Navigate to the EFI/ubuntu/ folder, then choose either the shimx64 or grubx64 depending on if you have Secure Boot enabled or disabled respectively. Give the boot option a label, then go back to the boot options tab, and it should now appear in the list. After highlighting it use F6 to bring it up to the top (or at least above Windows Boot Manager). Now save the changes and reboot once more. This should drop you into the Ubuntu Grub boot options.

Once more, boot with the "nouveau.modeset=0" override (this must always be done until you either add it by default to grub, or install the Nvidia binary driver which blacklists the Nouveau module). This should leave you with a working dual boot Ubuntu/Windows 10 setup.

More to follow. Feel free to post questions or comments!

 

Hardware Review:

General build quality:

The laptop itself is solid. It does not creak or bend when picked up and the display hinge is not too loose or too tight. The display can bounce a bit if you type hard on a table.

Keyboard / Trackpad:

The keyboard has a good feel to it and the backlighting is a comfortable red that only has one brightness level. It can be turned on or off via FN+F9 in both Windows and Linux which is convenient. The keyboard layout is nice. I like having full shift keys on both left and right, and the left control key is in the correct place which is nice. Unfortunately my keyboard has chinese characters on the caps. I do not know if this was a mistake or not (the European review did not have these, but it had a different layout as well), but its not annoying if you can touch type.

The trackpad is a Synaptics Clickpad, which works well under both Linux and Windows 10. The "click" function is a bit loose on my trackpad, so it can make a bit of a noise if you use tap to click, but the feel is good I haven't had any experiences of the trackpad going haywire. The driver under windows 10 was a bit tricky to get installed and working. I ended up using the version directly from Synaptics, and had to force install it rather than letting Windows detect it or using the setup executable. Once you do this you can have the normal Synaptics customization in the Control Panel to configure two finger scrolling or gestures.

More to come!

 

Hi,

I have also an Acer Aspire VN7-592 G with Windows 10 pre-installed.
I am trying to install Ubuntu alongside Win 10 in dual boot, but no matter what version I put 14, 15, 16 at boot I have no option of booting Ubuntu in the boot menu in UEFI mode.
Secure boot is disabled as well.
If I try to boot it in Legacy mode, and choose Ubuntu the PC is freezing.
I have no idea how can I fix this so that I can have Ubuntu and Win 10 alongside in dual boot.

Any help wpuld be apreciated.

Thanks

 

I don't think that grub has the ability to add a working EFI boot entry to this laptop. Please try what I did in the original post adding a boot entry manually in the bios after installing Debian. The steps should be the same for Ubuntu. Oh, and install Windows first and let it create the EFI partition, grub can add its boot files into the same EFI partition alongside Windows.

Sadly I have returned this laptop so I can't do any troubleshooting with it (or take pictures) but I do think it should be possible to make it work, it will just take some tinkering. You might also try cross posting this over on the Ubuntu Forums as well, there are very knowledgeable people there that can help get you further along.