Tiny Core 7.2 booted from a USB pen drive without any problems.
Scottie4442 has tried out Ubuntu 16.04, Linux Mint 18, Fedora 25, Centos 7 and Windows 10 pro. pfsense worked, but without wifi as the supplied wireless card is not supported in FreeBSD. (You can obviously fit a different card if you want to use pfsense).
In February 2021 I installed Linux Mint for a while used one for the occasional Zoom meeting.
These days booting an installed OS is more complex than it used to be what with MBR/GPT/Legacy/EFI/Secure Boot/... options. In March 2021 I heard from Erik:
I've been trying to install Debian on a t620 on the mSATA drive. I created a bootable USB with Rufus using debian-10.8.0-amd64-netinst.iso and GPT partition scheme default other settings. The t620 booted off the USB fine and it seemed to install fine but when I came to boot from the internal mSATA it said there was 'no boot disk'.After a lot of googling, I found Boot Repair. I installed the boot repair iso on a USB with Rufus using the same settings as before and booted off that. I then used the 'Recommended Repair' button and now its booting ok!
Interestingly, I had tried installing Lubuntu 20.04.2 earlier with similar problems, but then read there should have been an 'erase disk' option in the partition setup. If it's missing it means a swap partition on the disk is mounted. the command:
sudo swapoff -a
unmounts it. The erase disk option was then available and partitioning using that let the t620 boot off the drive also.
In May 2021 I heard from Fredrik, another Debian user:
I just installed Debian (debian-10.9.0-amd64-netinst.iso) on my t620. All went well except that X11 wouldn't start. Here are the changes I made to get it going:
- Edited two lines in
/etc/apt/sources.list
and added "non-free
" and "contrib
" to those:
deb http://deb.debian.org/debian/ buster main non-free contrib
deb-src http://deb.debian.org/debian/ buster main non-free contrib- Installed the firmware needed that is not included in the free Debian repositories:
apt-get update
apt-get install intel-microcode firmware-misc-nonfree firmware-amd-graphics firmware-realtekIt still complains about some firmware files missing for the graphics, but I ignore those for now. The possible missing firmware is
/lib/firmware/amdgpu/vega20_asd.bin
for module amdgpuCPU wise I guess the t620 with my 2 core version, is a little like a lazy RPi 4 :)
I have received the odd email from people having trouble with installing Debian onto the t620. Generally the comment is that the installation is apparently successful but then they find the system won't boot. ("No Boot Disk") This is an issue with UEFI booting, not Legacy booting. It's actually something that's easy to fix.
Essentially, for UEFI systems, the Debian installer puts the boot files into the directory
/EFI/debian/
on the ESP partition. Ignoring exactly what the standard says about UEFI boot
loaders (and I haven't waded through the standard to check) the t620 boot code appears to look for the file
EFI/boot/bootx64.efi
on the EFI partition and ignores the debian
directory.
So all that needs to be done is to create the directory boot
and copy over the file
debian/grubx64.efi
to boot/bootx64.efi
.
I used to have some more words about this here but in December 2021 I heard from Wouter who had run into the same problem but provided a simple solution:
The Debian Wiki on UEFI explains what is happening with GRUB not being in /boot. The easiest solution I found is to install Debian in "Expert mode" and then when installing GRUB it will ask if it should copy to /boot as well. When answering Yes it will work from the start. No need to fiddle with other tools!