Lenovo Y520 and Debian?

[Bill Harris]

Has anyone installed Debian on a Lenovo Legion Y520?  The Debian Installation Manual for Stretch makes it sound straight-forward to do in general: repartitioning the disk on the fly, dealing with UEFI, and being sure to turn off secure boot. That sounds like it could create a dual-boot or a Linux-only machine.

But It doesn't mention the fake RAID aka Intel RST.  Are there instructions that take that into account?

I'm willing to consider leaving the partition that seems to be on the SSD alone (it's /Windows, I believe) and split the 1.8TB partition into something like 300 GB for Windows, something for /boot, something for / (perhaps 500 GB?), and the rest for /home.  

If it's both easy and foolproof enough, I'm also open to wiping out everything and installing Stretch.  I've set up dual boot on the last 2 or 3 machines I've had and then almost never booted Windows.  If a Debian-only box worked, I guess I could put / on the SSD (or, better, the fake RAID) and have a faster machine.  Can you update the BIOS from Linux?  

Thanks,

Bill

[Shawn Hughes]

Have you considered running Windows in a VM under Debian?
It would let you use both at the same time, rather than having to reboot
to switch.
I have Debian Jessie + KVM/QEMU running on a T540p with (2) SSD's (2.5"
+ m.2).

--
Shawn Hughes
Brighton I.T. Solutions, LLC
888-624-2588

[Bill Harris]

Thanks for the suggestion, Shawn.  I've thought about it, but I don't have a Windows license that allows that (unless W10 is different than my understanding of my prior W7 license).  I also haven't used Windows enough in the past few years to warrant the effort to set it up.

Besides, I think my concern comes ahead of  that: do I need to do anything special to prepare for Intel RST (fake RAID)?  If I knew that there were no problems ahead with that feature, then I could just start the installer, choosing to repartition for dual-boot or for only Linux, if I wished. 

Bill

[Bjørn Mork]

Bill Harris <wshar...@gmail.com> writes:

> Besides, I think my concern comes ahead of that: do I need to do anything
> special to prepare for Intel RST (fake RAID)? If I knew that there were no
> problems ahead with that feature, then I could just start the installer,
> choosing to repartition for dual-boot or for only Linux, if I wished.

I have no experience with this feature, but this wiki page might help?:
https://wiki.debian.org/DebianInstaller/SataRaid



Bjørn

[DI Florian Reitmeir]

Hi,

virtualbox does run on all windows editios since windows 7.

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[Josh Blagden]

I thought I read something somewhere that said you can turn off RAID in the BIOS for the Y520. Or that might be for the Y720, though I'm pretty sure those two laptops are very similar, the only difference I can discern being the amount of VRAM for the GPU.

Josh Blagden

[Josh Blagden]

This forum thread might help with the RAID issue: https://forums.lenovo.com/t5/Linux-Discussion/Lenovo-Legion-Y520-Linux-Support/td-p/3694784

Josh Blagden

[Bill Harris]

Bjorn, that looks promising if a bit complex.  I think I've got 256GB of SSD, but I suspect that's not enough for /Windows and / on Linux.

Josh, I think you're right.  Perhaps that's the way to go: Linux will be slower than it could be, but it may be easier.  

What I don't know is if I can leave everything as it is, shrink the 1.8TB NTSF partition, and use the free space for /, /boot, and /home.

Is it safe to say that writing to the RAID partition writes to both the HDD and the SSD?  I'll have to find a description of that, too.

Thanks,

Bill

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Bill Harris                   
http://makingsense.facilitatedsystems.com/