HP ZBook Studio G4

Shrinking Windows Partition and a Note On Units (GiB vs GB)

Use Disk Management in Windows: press Windows key, type diskmgmt, click on first thing that has a blue gear and white checklist underneath.

Then on the Windows (C:) block, right-click on that, and click "Shrink Volume". You will want to give as much disk space as you want to/can for Linux (minimum ~10GB, or ~9537MB, the units are wrong/misleading in Windows, it should be GiB/MiB because of the standard set in 2008 by the IEC (powers of 2 rather than 10, which are now technically supposed to be the MB, GB, etc, but GB/MB on many computers actually refers to GiB/MiB). Linux does this properly for a lot of things, which is why you see "GiB" instead of "GB" in many things.). You will also see this (usually) properly referred to in the chat as GiB/MiB, if you weren't aware, for example, 8 GiB of RAM = 8096 MiB of RAM = ... = 8*2^30 Bytes (B) = 2^3*2^30 B = (exponent rule) = 2^33 B of RAM.

Getting Ubuntu to Install and Boot

Download the Ubuntu 18.04 LTS ISO image from this website (hosted on-campus at Rose): http://mirror.csse.rose-hulman.edu/ubuntu-releases/bionic/

Since this comes from the CSSE server hosted at Rose, this will NOT count against your bandwidth at Rose.

This will NOT work off campus. Instead, download from the official Ubuntu website: https://www.ubuntu.com/download/desktop

Installfest PxE (network booting) Notes

PxE only does legacy boot, and will only install Ubuntu using legacy boot, which does not work after installing because when booting the laptop, there is no boot option for "ubuntu".

Use a flash drive instead for now. I tried disabling Legacy under one of the tabs in the BIOS (boot options) or something like that, but that didn't work.

Also, installing packages was slow when installing Ubuntu over ethernet instead of over wifi (it stalled most of the time).

Installing Ubuntu 18.04 LTS via Flash Drive

If you're using a flash drive, you will need to burn it in GPT format so you can boot from UEFI. If you're on Windows, use Rufus (an application you can download) to burn the flash drive. If you're on Linux, use Etcher (there is a command line interface). Using dd [which is a bit-for-bit copy of the ISO] may cause data loss (unfortunately, it has been reliable sometimes but iffy other times) and I don't recommend it unless you know exactly what you're typing in, and because of how the flash drives/CD-rom drives work to boot into an OS; it's just not optimal to use dd because of the way the OS handles flash drives for booting.

After writing the image to the flash drive, safely remove the drive on Windows to avoid damage. If on Linux, you MUST wait 5 seconds to prevent data loss from writing to the flash drive (because of how filesystems work in Linux), THEN unmount or remove the flash drive.

When rebooting, press and hold the ESC key EVEN WHILE the screen is off so you get to the Startup Menu on the HP laptop. Then, go down to boot options/boot menu and select Your Flash Drive Name (UEFI). DO NOT SELECT Your Flash Drive Name (Legacy) or you will not be able to boot Linux after installation.

May not be needed just for installation, but do just in case, we didn't do this during the installfest, but may fix the post-installation freezing issue: When you see the "GNU GRUB" bootloader screen, make sure Install Ubuntu is highlighted on screen, THEN press the "e" key on your keyboard. Press the arrow keys to navigate to the line that has "linux" in it, then at the end (the \ indicates a new line, or there is information after that, and is not part of the text that was entered originally), add the following:

acpi_osi=! acpi_osi="Windows 2009"

Source for how to add "kernel parameters" to the bootloader like this: https://askubuntu.com/questions/19486/how-do-i-add-a-kernel-boot-parameter (NOTE: foo=bar is an example kernel parameter they use, do not add it unless for some reason you do.)

This needs to be typed EXACTLY like this, with a space after the thing earlier (which was vt_handoff or something like that). Do NOT add anything else to the file or you may encounter weird errors/glitches when booting.

This prevents crashing when loading Linux because of the Nvidia graphics driver (the computer has a Nvidia Quadro/Intel Graphics card installed, but the Nvidia one causes issues, when the computer switches to using Nvidia) having issues. This happens in all Linux distros and is specific to this laptop (source: https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/HP_Zbook_Studio_G3#Using_hybrid_graphics).

Then press Ctrl+X to boot into the Ubuntu installer.

You will need to connect to Eduroam to get the latest security updates/packages before installing (HIGHLY RECOMMENDED!), see Getting_on_eduroam for more details for how to do this. This process is the same as (or similar to) Ubuntu 16.04 LTS (listed on that page), there may be slight differences here and there. We used rose-hulman.edu as the domain. Be sure remember to use your FULL [username]@rose-hulman.edu email address for username (because it's on eduroam so it works at all colleges), or it may not connect!!!

You will want to keep Windows, just in case, so dual boot by selecting the "Keep alongside Windows Boot Manager" when you get to it. Make sure that no partitions are DELETED if you see a dialog (ones that are added are OK), then click OK. A GRUB bootloader will let you run either Ubuntu or Windows every time you start your computer.

Once you are done, you can reboot your computer. If the computer freezes and doesn't come back up after 3-5 or so minutes, it is safe to force shutdown. The GRUB bootloader (which the Ubuntu installer installed) will start automatically instead of Windows. Press the arrow keys to navigate to either Ubuntu or Windows (it says "Windows Boot Manager").

Booting Ubuntu after Installation [Important Instructions/Changes Here!!]

IF RUNNING UBUNTU, MAKE SURE YOU DO THIS BEFORE BOOTING, or else your computer may freeze/hang and you may need to reboot.

When you see the "GNU GRUB" bootloader screen, make sure "Ubuntu 18.04 LTS" or similar is highlighted on screen, THEN press the "e" key on your keyboard. Press the arrow keys to navigate to the line that has "linux" in it, then at the end (the \ indicates a new line, or there is information after that, and is not part of the text that was entered originally), add the following:

acpi_osi=! acpi_osi="Windows 2009"

You can do this automatically, see this link for more details: (untested, might cover at next club meeting) https://askubuntu.com/questions/19486/how-do-i-add-a-kernel-boot-parameter

Hopefully this issue can be fixed by the Ubuntu team themselves in the near future. Dell Precision 2016/2017 laptops do not have this issue, because the graphics drivers/ACPI interface that works with Linux works properly by default. (On other laptops, as far as I know, there is no official way to patch the BIOS drivers to fix it. It would be really tough to do by yourself anyway.)

Extra note to check to see if booting into Linux works after installing/just to check it out:

In the BIOS, if you want to see what the boot menu options are after installing, when rebooting, press and hold the ESC key EVEN WHILE the screen is off so you get to the Startup Menu on the HP laptop. Then, go down to boot options/boot menu. You should see "ubuntu" as an entry. If you do, congratulations! You've successfully installed Linux!

You can also rearrange the boot order in the BIOS settings if you want Windows to boot first, or the bootloader menu to boot first, etc. AFAIK you can't just boot Ubuntu directly, and I wouldn't recommend it anyway, in case you need to test/change something. There might be a way to do both (using a key combination/other special tool), etc. but you may experience other issues in this case. Contact the Telegram group if you have questions/need help.

You can ALWAYS uninstall Ubuntu if you want by going to Windows Disk Utility again and overwriting those partitions Ubuntu created (google which partitions for Windows you need to keep). Contact EIT or one of us if you accidentally overwrote your Windows installation somehow. We can help you get it fixed. You can also install another distro on top of it or overwrite Ubuntu with another distro, but be careful, your data will still be removed if you overwrite the ext4 partitions Ubuntu created!

Tech Specs

The 2018 laptop given to Rose students has the following specs:

Processor	Intel Core i7 7820HQ (2.9GHz stock, 3.9GHz boost, not overclockable)
RAM	16 GB @ ???MHz DDR4 (2x8GB SODIMM sticks)
Solid State Drive	M.2 SATA3 256 GB (approx. 238.42 GiB) Solid State Drive (theoretical max 600MB/s) [Possibly not expandable, only 1 slot]
Optical Drive	None
Display	15.6" FHD 1920x1080
Video Card	Nvidia Quadro M1200M w/ 4GB RAM (supports Vulkan and OpenGL)
Network Cards	Intel Dual-Band 8265 802.11ac wireless, Gigabit (1Gb/s) Ethernet and PxE (network) boot via 2 USB Type-C ports using a compatible USB-C to Ethernet adapter
Battery	8 cell Lithium-Ion 94 WHr
USB	(3) USB 3.0 and (2) Thunderbolt 3 (USB Type-C form factor)
Pointing Devices	Trackpad (Synaptics?)
External Video Port	Dedicated HDMI port (and HDMI passthrough via Thunderbolt)
Integrated Webcam	720p integrated webcam
Network Accessories	USB Type C to Ethernet adapter
Warranty	4 year with Accidental Damage Protection (ADP)

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