Multi-arch installer for LMDE?

[saljut7]

Hi,

I wanted to install Linux Mint on an Asus Transformer T100 (so the "nice" situation to have a 32bit bootloader and a 64bit CPU). I didn't get it running with Linux Mint and the people of the Mint forum don't seem to have more ideas.

I tried to boot a multi-arch Debian9 which works fine. I could use "vanilla Debian" but the Notebook is for a friend with no Linux experience so the Mint look&feel would be much better.

So my question: Is there a multi-arch installer for LMDE?

[MintBean]

I would go with the standard Ubuntu Mint - even more newbie friendly.

[saljut7]

I would go with the standard Ubuntu Mint - even more newbie friendly.

As I explained I tried this but it is not possible to install the current Ubuntu/Mint on an ASUS Transformer T100 because of the 32bit bootloader/64bit CPU problem (compare viewtopic.php?f=90&t=276353&p=1520164#p1520164 ).

[MintBean]

My bad. There's only one installer for LMDE - it's an experimental project and only comes in one flavour.

[Nuts2u]

Actually there are 2 installers available in LMDE 3 On the LiveCD the icon on the desktop is the simple installer. The other on is the Calamares installer which is much more robust. It is the one I use to install LMDE3 onto a BTFS system. Goto to the menu and start typing Calamares, it will pop up in the menu, then click on it and follow the prompts.

[Monsta]

Looking at Calamares code here, I see it indeed might support 32-bit UEFI (with files like grubia32.efi and bootia32.efi).

[ChrisMW]

If that doesn't work, you might want to attempt my route, which I used on the LMDE 3 beta. I need a 64Bit UEFI + 64bit OS. I couldn't get the installer to give me a booting system. But you mentioned Debian works, and so it did for me. So what I did was to install Debian 9/Stretch/stable MATE and then convert it to LMDE 3. This was easy, as I had a virtual LMDE 3 installation. I booted Debian, loaded VirtualBox and booted the LMDE 3 VM as well. I then copied the repositories info, created a list of installed packages and got to work. I copied the apt config, the repo info and simply started to install everything on the list.

The result is perfectly working system that went from Beta to normal without any fuss. I've added the stretch-backports, and took a newer libreoffice, kernel and MATE desktop environment from there. Both Cinnamon and MATE work. The only niggle I have is that MATE starts Nemo and not Caja. Caja works well for me, so I might get around to fixing that at some point. But that is what a regular LMDE 3 installation does set up. Today I installed LMDE 3 on an aging X61, that was running LMDE 2. I did a clean install, personally I find it easier.

I was running Debian Buster/10/testing before that, but as I couldn't get the DisplayLink driver to work, I wanted to try Stretch/9/stable. And LMDE 3 gives you a newer Cinnamon, the backports give you a newer kernel and newer MATE. And let's face it, LMDE 3 simply is much more polished and usable than Debian 9 is, out of the box. My laptop can now drive the DisplayLink adapter without any issues. So having left LMDE 2 because it was getting too old, moving to Debian 10, I've returned to LMDE 3 and am very happy with the end result. The only issue was the initial install, which I worked around by converting Debian to LMDE 3. Which is more doable than you might think. I noticed that the Debian Stretch repo is listed as the base repo, and cindy is listed as the main. It is much closer to Debian than LMDE 2 was, and IMO this is a very good thing.