Bootable Mint usb not working in Teclast F7

[murray_khodd]

Just bought a new Teclast F7, a 14" notebook with intel graphics. Win 10 preinstalled. Cheap, with modest performance but great screen and keyboard, therefore potentially an excellent linux travel computer.

Strangely I have been able to install manjaro no problem but nothing will let me install Mint. Can enter bios, have turned safe boot off. Manjaro USB created with etcher boots no problem, but any bootable usb created using any Mint ISO wont work, whether created with Etcher, Rufus, Unetbootin, or the Mint USB utility. In each case the bootable Mint USB works in my other laptop though it's not uefi. When I try to boot from the USB I immediately get a black screen with just a single white hyphen in the very top left. (When the manjaro usb boots the screen is completely black for half a minute then it loads perfectly.)

Any ideas? I'm thinking this is a uefi issue but don't know why that would be a problem with some distros and not others.

Cheers

[michael louwe]

@ murray_khodd, .......

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A similar spec'ed Chinese netbook that has the same problem ... https://www.cnx-software.com/2017/10/22 ... ths-later/

[bbaker6212]

Just bought a new Teclast F7, a 14" notebook with intel graphics. Win 10 preinstalled. Cheap, with modest performance but great screen and keyboard, therefore potentially an excellent linux travel computer.

Strangely I have been able to install manjaro no problem but nothing will let me install Mint. Can enter bios, have turned safe boot off. Manjaro USB created with etcher boots no problem, but any bootable usb created using any Mint ISO wont work, whether created with Etcher, Rufus, Unetbootin, or the Mint USB utility. In each case the bootable Mint USB works in my other laptop though it's not uefi. When I try to boot from the USB I immediately get a black screen with just a single white hyphen in the very top left. (When the manjaro usb boots the screen is completely black for half a minute then it loads perfectly.)

Any ideas? I'm thinking this is a uefi issue but don't know why that would be a problem with some distros and not others.

Cheers

My guess why this is happening is that Manjaro being a "rolling release" distro means it's shipping with a newer Linux kernel version that has a fix for the problem with Apollo Lake devices not booting with the GRUB boot manager. Things you can try is using a Mint distro version with a newer kernel (or waiting for one to be released), or roll your own using Linuxium's ISO respin script for Ubuntu flavored distro's which includes LinuxMint. You can also probably just install the rEFInd boot manager instead of GRUB. It works on Apollo Lake devices.
But why not just run Manjaro XFCE?

[bbaker6212]

Search the TechTablets forum for my posts on how to install various distros (on the EZBook 3 Pro which is also an N3450 Apollo Lake notebook)...
https://techtablets.com/members/brad/forums/