Issues I had when installing Linux on HP EliteBook 755 G5

I had weirdest errors when installing/using Linux on this laptop including (it's here just for reference and improved search visiblilty).

• Arch/Manjaro Linux (no GUI) --- freezes during install.
• Debian Stable (only vesa graphics card)
• Debian Testing (frozen during install; bear in mind that eventually --- see step 1 --- I'm using buster)
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux (almost working, but I got a lot of "Hardware Errors" in syslog). Also in about 50% cases system wouldn't boot (but then after restart it would).

If you are experiencing such issues it means that you have invalid bios installed, and you need to downgrade it (see below for details).

Solution

You'll need to downgrade your bios to version 01.00.04 Rev.A 13.6 MB Jun 8, 2018, you can download one from HP website.

Easiest way to install it is to download and run supplied exe on original windows.

I have no idea why this works, here is original suggestion.

Debian installation procedure

Here is what I did:

1. Downgrade bios;
2. Install Debian Buster (yes you need testing as recent kernel is needed);
3. Install firmware-amd-graphics package that contains amd card drivers;

Wifi driver

See this bug for debian issue tracking.

Long story short: there is some issue with firmware-realtek package, and proper module is not built, so I needed to build it from sources, via:

git clone https://github.com/lwfinger/rtlwifi_new.git
git checkout origin/extended -b extended
cd rtlwifi_new
make install
modprobe -r rtl8822be
modprobe -v rtl8822be

More specifically, commit: a562bccf219f6842608125f6aee01d9da3b2dedd worked.

Amd graphics drivers

Everything seems to work OK (will write more when I get more tests).

I get error report in syslog from time to time, see this bug for details

Useful Hints

1. Don't delete windows, I guess you'll need it to upgrade bios/microcode.

   I just backed up whole disk image to nas server in my home using debian live edition and following command:

   cat /dev/nvme0n1 | pigz | ssh my-nas 'cat > /data/file.img.gz'
   

   Tarball was about 40GB size.

   Probably you can use more fancy tools, but whatever works works.

2. Try a throwaway install, I wasted a lot of time when installer overwritten volume with random data for dm-crypt.