Lenovo Thinkpad 8 (32 bit) – Dual booting Windows 8.1 and Ubuntu
After reading lots on this I figured I should at least make a quick blog entry for people to be able to find. It appears there is not a lot of support out there for our tablet and with Lenovo switching to a 64-bit version for the newer tablets these are essentially being forgotten about. Of course I titled this for my intent, dual-booting, however you could also choose to remove Windows 8 entirely and make the device linux only.
You CAN get Ubuntu to boot on them, you just need a little extra work to prepare your image. First off, get yourself an ubuntu iso from their website. I used ubuntu-14.10-desktop-amd64.iso in the following example.
You’ll also need a 32-bit EFI bootloader, I’ve compiled it for my own use and figured I might as well make it available to those that need it:
http://www.shadowmite.com/files/bootia32.efi
Let’s say you have a 8gb USB drive that when you plug into an existing ubuntu machine it comes up on /dev/sdb. Follow these commands to build a working boot disk:
sgdisk --zap-all /dev/sdb
sgdisk --new=1:0:0 --typecode=1:ef00 /dev/sdb
mkfs.vfat -F32 /dev/sdb1
mount -t vfat /dev/sdb1 /mnt
7z x ubuntu-14.10-desktop-amd64.iso -o/mnt/
cp bootia32.efi /mnt/EFI/BOOT/
umount /mnt
Enjoy, I might create another post as I work on getting the hardware fully working.