How do I install a different distro via USB?

Hello, I flashed a Manjaro install onto a thumb drive to install to my librem 11.

After selecting to boot it from the bios menu it fails to boot. Note the USB will boot on my PC.

Is there something special I must do in order to get this to boot?

1 Like

Manjaro and Garuda have a known issue that PureBoot isn’t able to boot them automatically. It’s possible to boot them manually from the recovery shell: Librem 11: SeaBIOS/Coreboot does not recognize keyboard. PureBoot does not boot USB - #19 by jonathon.hall

Most other distributions boot from USB normally. Arch and Manjaro both appear to have a problem in the latest kernel’s i915 module, we had to roll back to a 6.5 kernel (noted in that thread).

PureBoot also requires an unencrypted /boot partition. Some distributions default to this, but others do not; partition manually if the distribution defaults to something else.

If you plan to use automatic screen rotation, you will want the accelerometer mount matrix as well - https://source.puri.sm/librem-11/librem11-base/-/blob/pureos/latest/default/61-librem-11-accelerometer.hwdb. (Linux lacks support for getting that from the firmware via ACPI currently, so we added the quirk in PureOS.)

1 Like