Recently, I bought an Acer Spin 3 Convertible Notebook for the company and provided it to Robert Tari for his daily work on Ayatana Indicators (which currently is funded by the UBports Foundation via my company Fre(i)e Software GmbH).
Some days ago Robert reported back about a sleepless night he spent with that machine... He got stuck with a tricky issue regarding the installation of Manjaro GNU/Linux on that machine, that could be -- at the end -- resolved by a not so well documented trick.
Before anyone else spends another sleepless night on this, we thought we'd better share Robert's solution.
So, the below applies to the Acer Spin 3 series (and probably to other Spin models, perhaps even some other Acer laptops):
Acer Spin 3 Pre-Inst Cheat Codes
Before you even plug in the USB install media:
- Go to UEFI settings (i.e. BIOS for us elderly people) [F2]
- Security -> Set Supervisor Password [Enabled]
- Enter the password you'll use
- Boot -> Secure Boot -> [Disabled] (you can't disable it without a set supervisor password)
- Exit -> Exit Saving Changes
- Restart and go to UEFI settings again [F2]
- Main -> [Now press CTRL + S] -> VMD Controller -> [Disabled]
- Exit -> Exit Saving Changes
- Now plug in the install USB and restart
Esp. the disabling of the VMD Controller is essential. Otherwise, GRUB won't find any partition nor EFI registered boot items after the installation and drops into the EFI recovery shell.
Robert hasn't tested the Wacom pen that comes with the device, nor the fingerprint reader, yet.
Everything else works out-of-the-box.
light+love
Mike Gabriel (aka sunweaver)