Lenovo IdeaPad S205
Overview
The Lenovo IdeaPad S205 has some issues with the Bootloader and WiFi.
Hardware
The unit used for testing contained the following hardware:
- Processor: AMD E-450 APU (integrated Mobility Radeon HD6320)
- WiFi: Ralink RT3090
Firmware
The IdeaPad uses a system firmware based on the SecureCore Tiano Platform. It supports UEFI and Legacy booting, but you cannot manually switch between them; which one is used depends whether the disk is partitioned as GPT or MBR. It does not have secure boot.
The firmware has many bugs. If anything related to it does not work, try loading setup defaults.
Installation
Follow the Installation guide until bootloader installation.
You can not use the GUID Partition Table and still boot using legacy BIOS. If your desired partition layout does not work for MBR you must use UEFI.
UEFI
While installing the bootloader, you might get the error
Failed to create EFI Boot variable entry: No space left on device
The firmware wants the .efi-file to be the UEFI default loader, specifically <ESP>/EFI/boot/bootx64.efi
The firmware does not seem to be able to boot any other file, thus giving you the above error message.
The trick is to just copy your bootloader, (grubx64.efi systemd-bootx64.efi, etc) to <ESP>/EFI/boot/bootx64.efi and reboot into your system.
WiFi
Drivers work out of the box.
If you are using UEFI, your device might show up as hard blocked. This is due to a bug in the firmware. You can fix it by doing the following things:
- Go into system firmware settings and reload factory defaults
- If WiFi still does not work, change the boot order so that it boots from PXE (PCI LAN) before booting from Hard Drive.
Touchpad
Works by installing the xf86-input-synaptics package.
Sound
Detected by ALSA automatically.
Graphics
The open source xf86-video-ati driver works fine and is recommended.