No GRUB, No WiFi Device in `lshw` on Dell Venue 11 Pro

Hardware Support
8

So here's my final post in this whirlwind adventure, laying out the last step of my journey to something is - at least for me - an acceptable trade-off and technically working. I leave this for my own future reference in case it breaks in the future, for @swarfendor437, and for anyone else with one of these cursed devices with mixed bit-depth from the dawn of Windows 8.1 looking to extend its godforsaken lifespan.

  1. Starting where I left off in my previous comment, LMDE 32bit installed fine using the default partition options to let it do what it wants, except the bootloader just vanished. Nothing visible even in the BIOS this time, though still bootable from Super Grub2 Disk.

  2. Installed Windows 10 Enterprise LTSC 2021 with the hope it would establish a baseline usable bootloader again, which it thankfully did. I didn't activate the install or change any settings, beyond saying no, f-u to most of the questions during initial setup before you get to the desktop; literally just install and reboot to confirm it worked.

  3. Re-installed LMDE 32bit, this time manually wiping out everything except the EFI System Partition (ESP) and Windows Recovery partition (not sure why I left the latter though), telling it to use the existing ESP for GRUB and the blank space for everything else. Upon rebooting, this resulted in Windows Boot Manager constantly trying to boot into the Recovery partition due to missing an actual Windows OS.

  4. From the accepted answer on this Super User thread, after using SG2D to boot into LMDE again, I ran the following commands:

sudo apt-get install --reinstall grub-efi
sudo grub-install --target=i386-efi --efi-directory=/boot/efi
sudo update-grub
sudo efibootmgr -c --disk /dev/sdX --part Y # for me it was more like `/dev/mmcblk2 --part 1` I think
sudo efibootmgr -v # verify new records called Linux and debian are there
sudo update-grub

  1. After disabling the Windows partitions from the boot sequence in my BIOS and setting the new "debian" as number 1, I was finally presented with a real, working grub boot menu that really worked and sent me into LMDE! Turns out, though, that LMDE is too resource-hungry for this little Intel Atom + 2GB tablet, idling at around 1.5GB of RAM usage. Just opening Firefox, without navigating to any page, was enough to grind the system to a halt...

  2. Booted into GPartEd (or use it via a live ISO) and shrank the LMDE partition to ~12GB (11444MiB), then installed Zorin 16.3 Lite using the "something else" option to specify the new ~50GB blank space for the OS and giving it the exact ESP partition (not just overall drive) to use for the bootloader. Thankfully this meant it didn't try to install its own 64bit grub and instead just hijacked LMDE's 32bit grub with its own Zorin config (much nicer theme btw!) allowing me to boot straight into either Zorin on LMDE at will.

On such a low-power device with such limited storage, this both is and isn't an issue. For me it's fine, as this tablet is only used for casual web browsing. For others, letting LMDE take up so much of their incredibly limited space may be a deal-breaker.

It could well be possible to also delete the Windows Recovery partition and modify step 3 above to install LMDE on a 12GB partition at the end of the drive, then install Zorin between the ESP and LMDE, and finally wipe LMDE and expand the Zorin partition to fill all the space... but I have no need to try this given my needs and the risk of it breaking the bootloader and leaving me to reinstall two, if not three, operating systems all over again.

As a final note, with 16.3 Lite using Xfce4, I recommend a couple of steps from this Reddit thread to enable one-finger touchscreen scrolling in Firefox:

  1. in about:config set the property dom.w3c_touch_events.enabled to 1
  2. edit / create one of /etc/environment or ~/.pam_environment with the content: MOZ_USE_XINPUT2=1
  3. reboot
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