Linux

Progress has been made on the Lenovo Ideapad Yoga 11. It is now possible to boot Linux on the device.

Current hardware support

• Screen & HDMI

• WiFi

• Touchscreen

Prebuilt binaries

TODO: still need to be checked if they work.

Modules are (our file mirror). Too big for GitBook.

and can also be downloaded from our file mirror.

Booting

Prerequisites

To get started, make sure test signing is enabled. Visit for instructions on how to do it.

Preparing the files

• To boot to a desktop Linux environment, you need to put a Linux Distribution onto your SD card. is tested and works.

• You also need to prepare a FAT32 formatted USB drive. Visit for possible issues and instructions when formatting.

• Get the Golden Key USB setup from , and extract the given ZIP to your USB drive.

As disabling secure boot isn't supported on this device, the Golden Key exploit needs to be used to enable booting a Linux kernel. The Linux kernel's EFI Stub has a security check built-in that would normally prevent us from loading a custom device tree. This security check has been patched. This means we require to use the Golden Key USB setup.

Preparing files for WiFi / Installing modules

The WiFi driver requires being a module, as the built-in version would access a configuration file on the root filesystem, before the root filesystem is available. There are many other modules which is rather unimportant.

To install the modules, extract the modules ZIP file from above onto your root filesystem. The lib folder of the ZIP and the root filesystem should merge.

To get WiFi working you need to put the already mentioned configuration file onto your root filesystem too. The file path is integrated into the filename of the code block at the top.

@lgibson02 please test if it's working for you by placing the following file (config file above) in /lib/firmware/brcm You can also use connection manager with the frontend same as in the screenshot if you want: sudo apt-get install connman sudo apt-get install cmst And then just run cmst

Booting Linux

After you inserted the SD card and the USB drive into your device, boot from your USB. Use the instructions .

If you have done everything correctly RPI OS should show up after some time (up to 60 seconds).

Have fun 🙂

Compilation guide

Getting the source code

We upload all of our changes to our repository. Use the lenovo-ideapad-yoga-11 branch.

To download run git clone https://github.com/Open-Surface-RT/grate-linux.git -b lenovo-ideapad-yoga-11.

Configuring the build

We provide a defconfig for this device. Simply run make ARCH=arm lenovo-ideapad-yoga-11_defconfig.

Compile the kernel

Compiling is as simple as running make ARCH=arm CROSS_COMPILE=arm-linux-gnueabihf- -j<value> where value is the number of CPU cores you have available. Depending on your processors speed, the build takes from a handful of minutes to 10 minutes or longer.

If the build complains that arm-linux-gnueabihf-gcc was not found, install the compiler. For Ubuntu the install command looks like this: gcc-arm-linux-gnueabihf.

Output

The output kernel image (zImage) is arch/arm/boot/zImage. The output device tree is arch/arm/boot/dts/tegra30-lenovo-ideapad-yoga11.dtb.

Just put the zImage onto your USB drive and rename it to boot.efi. The device tree needs to be copied over too. No need to rename it.

To get your modules run make ARCH=arm CROSS_COMPILE=arm-linux-gnueabihf- -j6 INSTALL_MOD_PATH=module_out/ modules_install. The modules are put into the module_out/ folder with the correct directory structure. Just copy over the lib folder to your root filesystem. If you chose to compile the kernel yourself you need to use these modules.