Background

A friend of mine has a Lenovo ThinkPad 10 tablet and, wanting to install GNU/Linux on it, asked for my help. I was also curious to see how well different desktop environments work with touchscreens.

To avoid having to reformat a USB drive every time you want to boot a live ISO, you can use ventoy.

After testing several options, we decided to install Ubuntu. Since it was my friend’s first time using GNU/Linux, we decided to go step by step and I would explain the process at each stage. But right at the start, things got stuck. I tried several times using Rufus to create a bootable USB from the ISO file. Even though I had set USB as the first boot priority in BIOS settings (accessible by pressing the power button and volume-up simultaneously, where you can also change boot settings), disabled Secure Boot and Fast Boot — the system kept booting from the hard drive and wouldn’t recognize the USB drive as bootable.

I also tried the familiar method of writing the ISO to USB using dd, but while it booted fine on a laptop, it had problems on the tablet.

dd if=<PATH-TO-A-LIVE-ISO> of=/dev/sdx status="progress"

Here sdx is the block device corresponding to your USB drive, which you can find using lsblk.

After a bit of searching and checking the tablet’s specs, I realized this system uses a 32-bit UEFI, which is exactly why the USB was not booting.

What to Do?

The answer is simple:

• Format the USB drive as fat32.
• Manually copy the contents of the ISO file onto it.

To mount an ISO file on GNU/Linux, use the following command:

sudo mount -o loop <PATH-TO-A-LIVE-ISO> <PATH-TO-THE-FOLDER-YOU-WANT-TO-MOUNT-THE-ISO>

• Download the bootia32.efi file from the GitHub repository or from here and copy it to the /EFI/BOOT folder.
• Copy the grub.cfg file from the /boot/grub folder and place it in the root of the USB (/).
• Disable Fast Boot and Secure Boot, then boot the system from the USB.