This is my second attempt to install a Linux distro onto a brand new Samsung Galaxy Book Go. My preferred goal is to dual boot the system between Windows on ARM and Linux on ARM (I don’t really care what distro). I attempted an install of several flavors of “Ubuntu 20.04.3 LTS for ARMv8” yesterday with no success. I can get as far as the GRUB selection screen but the laptop reboots shortly after selecting any of the menu items. Using the “nomodeset” kernel boot option does not solve the issue either.
Today I used Fedora Media Writer to write the Fedora 35 ARM aarch64 image to a USB stick. That seemed to go well. I then booted up the laptop with the USB stick and once again got as far as GRUB. GRUB loads, appears to function (navigating the menu works, pressing ‘c’ drops to a command prompt, etc), I can select the “Test this media & start Fedora-Workstation-Live 35” option, press Enter, the screen clears and shows a cursor, and a few seconds later the laptop reboots. It never really gets much past GRUB. The fact that GRUB loads and runs says that the ARM-based CPU is executing instructions.
I also tried using a DVD + external DVD drive and the same rebooting problem came up.
Given that two separate distros have the exact same problem implies something is wrong with something fairly low level perhaps in the way instructions are being executed somewhere. Or maybe the hardware is faulty - perhaps by design - Samsung is notorious for being obnoxious. I just don’t know since there aren’t any error messages that appear prior to the reboot. It’s weird though that GRUB loads and runs just fine but appears to fail to proceed past that point.