[olug] Installing on eMMC

[William Haisch]

Samuel,

I had quite the adventure trying to install Linux Mint Cinnamon 17.3
64-bit on an ECS LIVA X tiny PC. It has 2 GB RAM and an internal
soldered-on 32GB eMMC SSD. I could boot the installer on a flash drive
and install Linux but the system would not boot. The trick for me was
three settings:

1. Keep the boot process as EFI by selecting "Windows 8" boot mode in
BIOS. This enables the 64-bit boot loader for loading 64-bit OS. I tried
the "Windows 7/Legacy/Other OS" option but that never booted after
install.
2. Let the installer choose the partitions sizes and layouts. This went
against my obsession of customizing the partitions but the alternative
was a useless machine.
3. Disable Secure Boot. Red Hat, Fedora, Ubuntu, and Linux Mint should
all have signed kernels and support Secure Boot but I still couldn't get
it to boot with Secure Boot enabled. Other blogs didn't have issues (on
other hardware) so you may have better luck.

Due to these issues, I could not install Linux Mint LMDE 2 on the LIVA X
because it just wouldn't boot even if I let the installer setup the
partitions. For anyone else thinking of buying a LIVA X, don't! The unit
won't boot if there is no active video display attached, the power
management features won't work on the default kernel (won't wake from
sleep, had to install the newest 4.2.0 from the Update Manager for
stability), wifi will drop randomly due to default wifi power savings
mode (I disabled it but it was a pain to figure it out!), it has the
Intel Bay Trail Atom CPU which isn't well supported by Linux yet, and
the Bluetooth interfered with the Wifi performance (so I disabled it,
don't need it anyway). This system is my media PC so it just has to kind
of work.

Hope this helps!
-Wm.