I got a newe Dell Inspiron 14 3420 (with Snapdragon 8Cx Gen 2 processor) with the intention of running some linux distro on it. I used the FedoraMediaWriter to create a bootable USB of Fedora 38, aarch64 version. Before inserting the USB I disabled secure boot. Once I was in the setup menu I selected the USB and it started GRUB. When I selected start Fedora 38 from the options (I had to go from the boot menu not the setup menu, when I went from setup the laptop keyboard didn’t work) it showed the Dell logo for a few seconds and then started GRUB again. What am I doing wrong?
Thanks.
Oof, sorry to hear that you are running into something here. A couple of things from my experience:
- Try using another USB stick to “burn” the image to it and boot with that
- Set the BIOS to the defaults and try it again (you can leave secure boot on if you want, it will still work)
Let’s start there and we’ll try other things should this not help…
Best on my experience, your best option for now is to use armbian.
You have to use a Generic ARM64 image from here:
Download a rolling image with kernel > 6.5 . The link below offers one with kernel 6.6.0 rc7 and XFCE DE:
https://github.com/armbian/os/releases/download/23.11.0-trunk.243/Armbian_23.11.0-trunk.243_Uefi-arm64_jammy_edge_6.6.0-rc7_xfce_desktop.img.xz
Write the image to a USB medium. I used Balena Etcher for that
You will probably need:
a USB keyboard, a USB Mouse, a USB Wifi or Ethernet stick because your laptop’s input and network devices will not work. You will not have enough USB ports for all these. Use a usb hub or a dock (if it’s available for your laptop).
You will also need to disable Secure boot (from ‘BIOS’) and set the boot priority to boot your USB device.
If all goes well you will have a working desktop environment without touching your laptop’s windows installation but as you have already understand, many more things will probably not work (audio, camera, internal storage etc).
Good luck