Neil
Bothwick is open-hearted as well as open source.
Q Notwork booting
I have a Dell Inspiron 3583 laptop that came with Windows 10. I didn’t like it and switched to Ubuntu. All went well until I installed 23.10, when my laptop crashed. When I tried to reinstall, all I got was PXE over IPv4 . Fortunately, I could run an OS as a live system. I tried several using Ventoy and then tried to install ones that I liked to the internal drive. All the live distros worked but attempts to install just came back with the PXE message. Then I tried Debian 12.5 and it installed without any problem. I tried other distros again but they back came with the PXE message. Of course, I now use Debian 12.5 and I like it, but what is going on?
John Goldspink
A We have seen this before when a system crashes and reverts to a default BIOS setting. That means that Secure Boot is enabled, so the computer will not boot from an OS that is not considered secure. PXE is a network booting protocol; when no suitable hard drive is found to boot from, the firmware looks for a network boot server, fails to find one and gives you that error message, as the last resort for booting has failed.
The reason that Debian worked for you is that it has support for Secure Boot, which requires signed code for the initial boot. Many other distros do not have the signed boot shims needed for Secure Boot, but the solution is remarkably simple. Provided you do not need Secure Boot – and if you have got rid of Windows, you do not – all you need to do is disable Secure Boot in the BIOS settings and all will be well. Just remember that if you have another hard crash, you may need to repeat this action.
Disabling network boot in the BIOS will stop the error message, but not the lack of booting.
Q Untouchable laptop
I have an HP laptop and am currently dual booting Ubuntu 24.04 with Windows 11. When I select Ubuntu from the GRUB menu, my Elantech touchpad is not detected. This is not due to my recent upgrade to 24.04 but has been an ongoing issue for years. I have noted on my, always fruitless, search for a solution to this problem that it is suffered by many other laptop users and covers many other laptop manufacturers. I have seen requests from so many who have posted on a variety of forums going as far back to Ubuntu 14.04 at least, and also for many other distros, for a solution to this self same problem. The following is my only, if ugly, method of getting a working touchpad on my laptop: when my GRUB menu first appears, I select the UEFI Settings option. I then select the Boot Options from the next screen, which opens the Boot Loader showing Ubuntu and Windows. On selecting Ubuntu, I am taken back to the GRUB menu! From the GRUB menu, I now select Ubuntu, which results in a fully functioning touchpad! When using Xinput, I get nothing detected for Elantech but a notice that I am using Xinput on Wayland. Under libinput, the Elantech mouse and touchpad are listed, but I have no mouse pointer or any response from the touchpad.
Colin Brammer