Can not see internal SSD when booting from Vinux5.x on a USB stick/can not install Vinux nor access files on aformentioned internal Drive

[B. Henry]

A few month ago I bought a new HP laptop, it's the envy X360, model
version that came out sometime in late spring 2018.

I got sighted help to disable secure boot in the bios, and to enable
booting from usb flash drive/put this first in boot order.

I can b oot in to Vinux, think it's 5.1  on this thumbdrive. Gparted
sees no partition other than the usb thumbdrive, nor can I find it with
gdisk blkid, and anything else I have tried after giving myself
superuser powers via sudo su in a console or terminal.

I am about to go crazy having to use Windows , and the linux for windows
subsystem while helpful for many little tasks does not allow a normal
gui experience, or audio with jumping through hoops. I have not tried
the latter, but will not live with windows as primary OS even with a bit
of linux running under it for much longer with out going crazier.

Please, help.

I asked on official HP forum on there sight, but have received nothing
useful, i.e other folks had no issues after disabling secure boot and
perhaps upgrading to latest bios, which I also did.

Win10 is much nicer than many ms os offerings, and I'll hopefully be
able to keep it for the couple of tasks that are not very doable for us
blind folk on Linux, but only as part of a dualboot system. As
mentioned, I can not even format the internal drive unless I remove it
and connect it as an external drive, maybe not even then...lol

This is one of those thin machines not really designed for the end user
to open, and I only want to do that once when I fill out the ram, but
really hope one of you can help me so adding a RAM module is all I have
to do; no removing main SSD.

I do not think there is anything else I need to tell you regarding
hardware. No bios option seemed useful but I am not sure what the tpm,
trusted platform module might do on this machine, any ideas there?

Regards,

[Willem van der Walt]

Hi,
It sounds like you have no support for the disk controler in the vinux
which I believe to be based on ubuntu 14.04.
First I would try is to get a more recent Linux and see if it see your
drive.
There seem to be a lot of different models of this laptop though.
There is someone who claim Ubuntu 18.04 runs on his.
See
https://www.reddit.com/r/Amd/comments/927z1f/hp_envy_x360_13_inch_with_linux_distro/
Once booted from the usb stick, I would do a lspci and a lshw and save the
output so as to be able to check for support.
Kind regards, Willem

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[Christopher Chaltain]

Yes, Vinux is based on Ubuntu 14.04. I have Ubuntu 16.04 installed on
the previous model of the same laptop. I also have Ubuntu 18.04 running
just fine in a virtual machine, so I agree with Willem, and I'd give
Ubuntu 18.04 a try. Hit alt+super+s to get Orca going at boot up and the
rest of the install should be completely accessible.

--
Christopher (CJ)
Chaltain at Gmail

[B. Henry]

Gentlemen, thank you for this suggestion which sounds like it may do the trick and end my months of suffering in windows limbo.
I've been dealing with family emerge ncys and upon return found that I'd been burgled; thus I've been occupied , and just catching up on April's email. I'll try a newer Ubuntu flavor and arch-linux which will again be my production distro if it also works. I'm so used to bsasic hardware working other than some wireless that disk controler issues did not occur to me. Of course this is the first new box I've had in ma ny moons, so Linux devs have  usually had years to catch up with any hardware I've owned...lol.
hI will let you know how things go in a few days when I have the chance to test newer distros/traveling  without laptop for a couple of days or I
'd jump on this right away.
Thanks again to my two favorite and most productive  Vinux group members for the help!

[D.J.J. Ring, Jr.]

Burt,

If you can get some sighted help, use antergos.  It does all the little configurations that arch wants you to do but which are very tedious the 3rd or 4th time you install.

https://downloads.sourceforge.net/project/antergos/mirror/iso/release/antergos-19.4-x86_64.iso

wget will snag that file.  It's meant for a DVD or USB stick.

Debian Buster is almost ready to come out, so their alpha and beta versions are very close to a release, and you can get speech by pressing s during installation.

There is also SLINT which is excellent and is fully accessible, my only problem is that as it's based on slackware, some applications that I feel I need are missing.  I cannot survive without gscan2pdf.  Slint has a OCR program that scans but it does not support HP wifi printers. gscan2pdf was supported a few releases ago on slackware.

As you know you can get Arch talking but as it comes out to you Antergos doesn't talk.

Be well,

David

[Didier Spaier]

Hello, answer below the quoted text

On 24/04/2019 02:27, D.J.J. Ring, Jr. wrote:
> There is also SLINT which is excellent and is fully accessible, my only
> problem is that as it's based on slackware, some applications that I feel I
> need are missing. I cannot survive without gscan2pdf. Slint has a OCR
> program that scans but it does not support HP wifi printers. gscan2pdf was
> supported a few releases ago on slackware.

You remind me that I had cloned the GIT repo for gscan2pdf a while ago.

Probably I didn't package it yet because it needs perl deps that
do not have packaged yet either.

I will have a look.

Best,

Didier

[Anders Holmberg]

Hi!

So i can not use any screenReader from that dvd?

Not even brltty.

/A

[D.J.J. Ring, Jr.]

Andrew,

I don't know if Antergos has changed.  It's a rolling distribution, so you never reinstall.

When I installed it, it did not speak.

I don't know if things have changed.

Debian speaks and so does Slint which is Slackware.

Best wishes,

David

[bando?ers@gmail]

Well, as my earlier posts indicated it's not been a biz as usual year for me, but I'm finally getting back to you good folk. I tried Ubuntu18.04, and had no better results. Since the hdd's not seen things like lshw don't help...lol. There were a number of ssd modelsmentioned in hp documentation, so perhaps some do have compatible drivers while others do not. I'll be back in touch soon after trying some searches on my machine's 256G sdd.

 

On Wednesday, April 3, 2019 at 12:09:29 AM UTC-6, Christopher Chaltain wrote:, Vinux is based on Ubuntu 14.04. I have Ubuntu 16.04 installed on

the previous model of the same laptop. I also have Ubuntu 18.04 running
just fine in a virtual machine, so I agree with Willem, and I'd give
Ubuntu 18.04 a try. Hit alt+super+s to get Orca going at boot up and the
rest of the install should be completely accessible.


On 4/3/19 1:00 AM, Willem van der Walt wrote:
> Hi,
> It sounds like you have no support for the disk controler in the vinux
> which I believe to be based on ubuntu 14.04.

snip

--

B.H.

[D.J.J. Ring, Jr.]

Burt,

Is this a newly made computer? Maybe it needs a driver that's not in Vinux.

Slint has every driver they could find.

It was slow in X Windows MATE on my old computer until I used the smaller kernel
following the instructions in /boot in the SLINT system. I'm sure a
new fast computer would have no problem with MATE.

Be well,

David

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[Didier Spaier]

Hello,

I second that.

Hello,

I second what David wrote.

Ubuntu 18.04 ships with a kernel version 4.15.
Slint ships a kernel version 4.19.30, so maybe yes, it can handle your
SSD

Installation instructions:
http://slackware.uk/slint/x86_64/slint-14.2.1/README.installation
About accessibility:
http://slackware.uk/slint/x86_64/slint-14.2.1/doc/Accessibility/Accessibility

You can check from the installer if your SSD is supported:
1. download, check and write on an USB stick the ISO, boot from it
2. at the beginning of the installation process, you will be asked to log
in as root (with no password). From this point you can type commands.
So type this one then press Enter:
lsblk -l -o vendor,model,name,size,type|grep disk
This will list the drives if they are supported.
If you SSD is listed, you can install Slint.

Best regards,

Didier