The first step in installation on a new laptop is everybody’s favorite game: which key do I press to get to BIOS? It took a couple tries, but on the Zephyrus G 44, the correct answer is . Pressing escape gets you to a boot selection menu, with an additional option to go into the BIOS / UEFI setup.
I already knew from my earlier experience with the Dragonfly G1 that using proprietary drivers and tainted kernels meant Secure Boot shenanigans. The Zephyrus G1 offers the ability to enroll a new key — but unlike the Dragonfly, it also allows you to disable Secure Boot entirely. This is just a test laptop, and there are only so many hours in the day, so I disabled Secure Boot rather than monkeying around with MOK keys.
With that done, and the USB drive selected as boot device, things looked good — I chose “Install Ubuntu” from the initial text mode menu. The screen cleared, and hey — an Ubuntu progress splashed underneath the Republic of Gamers logo! We’re on our way!
Five minutes of fans in leafblower mode later, the animation splash stopped moving entirely. Experimentally trying Ctrl (Alt) (F2) to pull a different TTY did not accomplish anything, so I long-pressed the power button to turn the laptop off.
On the second try, I chose “Install Ubuntu (safe graphics mode).” This went much better, and I nexted my way through an Ubuntu install, joining my Wi-Fi network successfully along the way. “Maybe this won’t be so bad,” I thought. Unfortunately, on first boot, I got a blank, black screen. But this time, pressing (Ctrl Alt (F2) got me a working text-mode TTY, and I could log in successfully.
While poking around the system, the problem reached out and smacked me in the face: nouveau, the open source Nvidia driver , began dumping kernel errors to console faster than they could be printed.
Now I knew what the issue was — but the console spam prevented me from accomplishing anything, so I rebooted again.
After rebooting, I pulled a console on TTY2 again and created a new file / etc / modprobe.d / blacklist-nvidia-nouveau.conf :
me @ zephyrus: ~ $ cat /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist-nvidia-nouveau.conf blacklist nouveau options nouveau modeset=0
Creating this file forces the system not to load the (nouveau) Driver, even though it sees a device it thinks could use it. With nouveau blacklisted, I rebooted again — and this time, I got a graphical desktop.
When the cursor is in that exact spot on boot, you don’t even have to touch the mouse to know it’s dead.
I stole the Threadripper’s mouse, and used it to install the proprietary Nvidia drivers.
Jim Salter
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