I tried to boot manjaro-kde from a usb stick on my Pipo X8S wit intel x5-z8350 and 32bit uefi.
After putting a 32-bit efi on the stick a was able to get to the screen “welcome to grub” nothing else, no grub menu. I found out when pressing ‘e’ I could start manjaro from editors mode. But then I don’t see nything on the screen. When editing the boot parameters to nomodeset, I can see manjaro starting up but it never goes to the graphical mode, it stays at the messages that it is starting up the graphical interface. Probably there is something wrong in my bios/efi settings, because the same live-usb starts fine on my dell venue 11 pro, also with 32bit efi.
The intel x5-z8350 has hd graphics 400 and is supported by the i915 driver, so normally I shouldn’t set the boot parameters to “nomodeset”. Also the fact I don’t have a grub menu would indicate there is something wrong with the display settings.
In my attempt to get it working I changed some uefi settings and now i can’t even go into uefi. So technically the device is bricked. If somebody has any idea how to reset the uefi to factory settings, your welcome. I already disconnected the small battery but still nothing, the screen stays black. Attaching a screen on the hdmi port didn’t work either.
I managed to get t it booting again and made some progress. I used a external screen and then I have no problems, Manjaro boots just fine. So it seems there is some problem with linux and the tablet screen.
When I try nomodeset in the kernel parameters I get a screen and with ctrl-alt-F2 a can go to TTY2, but I can’t restart the login manager or startx. But this seems normal because according the arch wiki, the i915 driver can’t be used with nomodeset.
According me manjaro boots fine but the screen just doesn’t show anything. I read somewhere that those tablets have problems with the back-lighting on linux. So probably that’s the problem. I have no idea how to troubleshoot this.
I don’t find the screen spec online, but similar results point me to a parallel-RGB screen. Seems I can find out with the modetest command. Modetest is a part of libdrm, but I have no idea which libdrm package I have to install to get the modetest utility.
There is also nothing written on motherboard of the device to see which interface the screen is using.
Otherwise it will be trial and error with different “video=” kernel parameters.
i got manjaro booting on the M8pro thanks to the script of Ian Morrison (Linuxium), see his blog post:
boot into grub by pressing F7 during PIPO boot screen to get hte UEFI menu. In the UEFI menu chose the manjaro usb stick.
In the grub boot menu press e and change your kernel parameters.
I had to add following kernel parameters: video=DSI-1 fbcon=rotate:3 nomodeset
I had to change following kernel parameters: i915.modeset=0
The terminal outpu will be rotated fine, but the desktop isn’t rotated and is in portrait mode. Didn’t find a way to rotate it. In arandr the option to rotate is grey. Maybe it’s because it’s in live-usb mode. No idea.
The accelerometer and the touchscreen doesn’t seem to work, but probably these features aren’t available in the live environment.