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Hi hope you guys are doing good, First all i would like to clear few things this is my first ever article you might expect some lack of information or too much information for you.
Primary purpose of writing this article is their will be many people who face problem of having low storage space on this laptop as you guys know
Hair Y11B come with only 32GB of SSD and 500 GB of HDD which is in keyboard section of the laptop. i will show you how you can solve this Storage problem but provided that you have to compromise on some laptop features with which i am perfectly fine, if you are fine too then this Guide is for you.(check end of the article)
i am assuming that you have some basic understanding of how to Install and work with Ubuntu.
so lets get started.
Step-1
First of all you have to Turn off the Secure boot option in the BIOS, you can press F2 while Laptop is booting to get in the BIOS.
you should also Disable quite boot option
Step-2
Now you have to install the Ubuntu i will not get in to the detail of each step here you can follow this tutorial to get the installation started.
Things got little different at step 4-Begin the installation explained in the above link. instead of following the default installation configuration . you should click on advance partitioning tool , in the link below you can learn how to create the manual partitioning
You will see two storage device at this step here in case of Y11b Laptop
Before Creating partition i recommend that you revert the 32GB SSD partition except efi partition if it is already there leave it like that and create following 3 partition’s of SSD
1- /
2- /home
3- swaparea
4- efi (it will automatically created by Ubuntu if not already exist)
This is how your partitions should look like
after this step you continue the normal process of installing Ubuntu and if everything is fine you should be able to boot in to the Ubuntu after installation.
the idea is to store your all data in /home directory(500 GB HDD) and Ubuntu(OS) on 32 GB SSD
Now i am assuming that you are able to login to the Ubuntu after installation and if your Wifi is working out of the box then this is an ideal situation for you, but if in your case if your wifi is not working or sometime it works and sometime not, then you have to install the correct wifi driver for your Wireless interface
Haier Y11B laptop have Realtek wireless interface card for which Ubuntu load rtl8xxxu driver which 90% of the time does not work. so to fix wifi issue you have to download and compile two drivers mentioned below,
initially you will need a USB Internet dongle as this laptop does not have a Wired LAN option or you can get these drivers downloaded on an other computer and then you can transfer them in to your laptop via USB and compile them. make sure you follow each step carefully.
Once you have the drivers , you can skip first few steps and Start from
step e. in case of both drivers installation ,and make sure you follow each step after step e. for both drivers.
you can download driver from below link , if you don’t know how to use git
Realtek RTL8723AU chipset (0bda:b720)
Realtek RTL8723BU chipset (0bda:b720)info:-
you can use sudo gedit instead of gksudo leafpad in the command to open files
After installing both driver Wifi might still not work for you to fix this.
your have to run these four commands every time you boot the Ubuntu only once, we can make a shell script which will run these commands on startup , for now you have to run these manually.
sudo modprobe -r rtl8xxxu
sudo modprobe 8723bu
sudo modprobe -r 8723bu
sudo modprobe 8723bu
sudo /etc/init.d/network-manager restart
now your wifi should be up and running and will not show unstable behaviors as long as you are using the system.
sometime if you suspend the system /home directory get unmounted but don’t worry you can mount it again using Disks tool of ubuntu
That’s it , now you don’t have to worry about the space in 32 gb SSD as it will be more then enough for you and all you personal data will go in to the 500 gb HDD
i know that it’s not a perfect solution but at least you can get rid of annoying Windows updates and windows itself :-p
i install Android Studio, Dota 2 , Brackets and many other software’s and i still got plenty of space in SSD as well as in HDD
So what is the downside of this lets list them down
- Touch sometime works and sometime it does not work
- you can detach the screen section but most of your programs will not work as long as it is detached once you attach the screen section again you have to mount the home directory using Disks tool as explained already
- i will recommend if you are doing some important work and want to suspend the system make sure you save your work as sometime HDD get unmounted which will result in crash/close of your programs once you wake system from sleep and then you have to mount the /home partition using Disks tool of Ubuntu.
That’s it. Tada Your system is ready to use .
