I just received my new Lenovo Edge 11 Dual AMD Neo K325 which I bought for a very attractive price of 345€. It features a 320GB hard drive, bluetooth and WiFi connectivity, a full-size keyboard, a multitouch trackpad, HDMI and VGA output and …. a make-up mirror. Really, I don’t get the thing behind that! And my last visit to the next nearby electronic store helped me to learn, that nower days all consumer s are exclusively supposed to always have their personal, high-priced make-up mirror handy. No single matte display in that store! Nevertheless: I still love this Thinkpad, mainly because it perfectly fits into my size vs. performance vs. pricing needs. Take a look if you are interested!
Due to the price this laptop comes without a pre-installed operating system. So it was a clear go for a new Ubuntu installation. As I prefer full-disk encrypted portable devices, I was aware that I had to go for the alternate installer CD. But after booting the installer claimed that it was unable to find a “common cd-drive”. I tried the Universal USB installer as well as the unetbootin tool to create the USB device. And both were supposed to work. But no change at all.
Finally I stumbled over this bug report at Ubuntu where one comment explains that this is a problem with the 7zip installer library used by both installers to extract the ISO file contents to the USB stick. It fails on path names exceeding 64characters and that’s the reason why the installer claims a “uncommon cd drive”. Nifty, ey? Ok – the solution is a simple as complicated. Use the usb-creator tool provided by ubuntu itself to create the bootable USB stick. And it already works.
Not yet for me. I needed around 4 retries until I figured out, that the crappy USB pen drive corrupted one file. But finally it worked well for me, too.