Installing any Linux on a TrekStor SurfTab duo W1?

[Yora]

While I was at my family, my dad asked if I might have any use for a TrekStor SurfTab duo W1 that he somehow had lying around and couldn't even remember how he got it. It's basically a ~12 inch diagonal tablet with an attachable keyboard. I like the size of that thing, but unfortunately it's running Windows 10.
Besides not having used any Windows since WinXP, even in it's pretty much out of the box state, the hardware of this thing seems to be hopelessly underpowered to just run Win10 and nothing else. To get any kind of use out of this, I'll somehow got to get Linux on it.

I've been wanting to try out Linux Mint for a while, but with this thing I am not particularly picky and would go with anything that I can get installed and that the hardware can handle. At the very least, with the keyboard attached, I got a working USB port. I made a USB stick with Mint on it, which my other computer can boot from, and the TrekStor does recognize and read it when Win10 is running. But I can't get it to boot from the stick. After a bit of searching, there seems to be an issue with 32 and 64 bit UEFI something, with 64 being default but only 32 working with the hardware, though I don't really understand what that's all about.

But maybe the version of Mint that is on the stick is incompatible with this hardware? Anyone familiar with this subject and might have recommendations on a Linux version I should try, or any other tricks that could make this device boot from the stick?

[factotum]

Well,for a start that tablet only appears to have 2Gb of RAM, so installing a 64-bit OS seems a bit pointless--have you tried just using a 32-bit version? Admittedly, for Linux Mint that would require you to download 19.3 because it was the last version available as 32-bit--you could get a fully up to date 32-bit distro by getting Debian, which is the one that Ubuntu, Mint and their ilk are ultimately derived from, but Debian does have a reputation (well-deserved, from what I know) of being awkward to set up and configure.

Oh, and I assume you already tried disabling Secure Boot in the tablet's BIOS?

[Yora]

Yes, getting those things configured wss one of the first things I did.

I am open to any suggestions for an operating system that could run reasonably well with 2 GB memory and only 28 GB of total storage space.
Apparently it is possibly with these things, but all I've found are the typical 4 year old forum threads that don't go into any specifics of what they did.

[Whoracle]

32-Bit won't help you. And there's no real drawback to use a 64-Bit Kernel, other than some slight disk usage overhead if the device is 32-Bit-only.

For reasons that I'll explain a bit further down, I'm guessing you won't be happy with any OS on that thing, Linux or Windows.

That being said, as a thought experiment I'd throw Arch Linux into the ring. Not Manjaro or any other "We've preconfigured stuff to make the installation easier" flavour of it, but plain Arch.

Here's the reasoning:
You're constrained by both Memory and Space (and presumably CPU). So you'd want a system that has a minimal footprint and only the stuff you really NEED on there. One way to reach that goal would be to custom build a system for this, like say Gentoo or LFS, but those need to be compiled on the target (or cross-compiled for the target, which is a whole other can of worms). But since your target is heavily underpowered, you'd need bloody AGES to finish that project, and maintenance afterwards would be even more of a pain.

So enter Arch: It's a binary distribution so you won't have to compile, but it doesn't make any assumption on what you'll want to install, other than a kernel and some really basic utilities, so you won't have any cruft on there.
On my current setup as we speak it clocks in at 2.05GB of RAM usage, with the following applications:

• A low(ish) footprint window manager (awesomewm)
• a text editor open as I type this
• a terminal to watch resource usage
• A browser (vivaldi) with 14 Tabs open
• a few autostart applications that I use on my fully-featured desktop that you won't need on the tablet anyways

System install size is pretty hard to gauge, but I think it'd be as low as 10, maybe 15GB.
And I'm running triple monitors with NVIDIA drivers, so that alone takes a good chunk of Memory.

So basically, install Arch with the following packages:

• base - Binutils and a few QoL packages
• linux - the Kernel
• nano - or vim or some other text editor
• syslinux - bootloader
• alsa and alsa-utils - as an audio backend
• pulseaudio - as an audio frontend
• pasystray - audio systray icon
• pavucontrol - audio volume control
• vivaldi - webbrowser, chrome based but not as heavy on the RAM NOMNOM - alternatively you can use firefox, I don't know how good that is nowadays. Not chromium or google-chrome, that's for sure
• xorg-server - display server for graphics
• mesa - drivers for your GPU - you may need more/others, depending on the hardware
• some kind of lightweight display manager like lightdm, or even better autostart your window manager via XINIT
• some kind of lightweight window manager - fluxbox for example
• pamac - a grpahical package manager
• networkmanager and network-manager-applet - for networking
• 3 or 4 other tools that you need - maybe a file browser like thunar, maybe a picture viewer like sxiv, VLC for video playback

Set Xorg to autologin a user into fluxbox, and you're done. Might even have less RAM usage than I have, since last time I checked I could get a naked fluxbox install down to ~600M of memory usage as opposed to my current ~710M.

Now, the reasons why I think you still won't be happy with this anyways:

• The main use case for such devices is web browsing, and the web has gotten ever more resource hungry. It's not the browsers that hog the resources, it's the websites that you view, and that's going to hit your poor old tablet HARD. For reference I installed the same setup as well as Win10 on my 2009 acer netbook with similar specs a few months back, and the thing was barely usable with Linux, and unusable with Win10
• You're on a tablet - this means you need an on-screen keyboard and a window manager that's optimized for touch input. Don't know which one would be good for this, but from a gut feeling that means GNOME, KDE or Cinnamon, and no way in hell you'll get to less than 1.5GB of base RAM usage with those. Without a mouse and keyboard you won't be happy using fluxbox or any other non-touch-optimized window managers, in any case.

You might want to check out https://www.android-x86.org which is an android port to the x86 platform. The mobile OSes are optimized to run with such resource constraints, and more importantly their apps are, too, so you might have more luck with this.

Still, I'd recommend giving Arch a go if you want to learn a bit about the inner workings of Linux and operating system bootstraping in general. The learning curve is a bit of a cliff, but it's still fun. Just don't expect to get a working system out of it on the hardware in question. If you want to go down that route: https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Installation_guide. Hit me up if you want more explanation.

[Whoracle]

I thought of three niche use cases that could feasibly work and be fun AND usable. All of those go the same route of ditching any semblance of general purpose usage and go directly for VERY specific. Two of these require some kind of Gamepad, wired or bluetooth.

Use it as a gaming device for Steam Remote Play
Install as described above, but ditch the window manager stuff and just install Steam: https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Steam. Configure it to run Steam at boot and in Big Picture mode, and use Steam Remote Play to stream games from another machine to the device. Obviously needs a controller.

Use it as a gaming device for RetroArch
Install as described above, but ditch the window manager stuff and install RetroArch (not related to Arch Linux): https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/RetroArch. Configure it to run RetroArch at boot, install a few libretro cores and play your ripped from the original cartridges ROMs. Obviously needs a controller. This might be the best use case for the thing, really.

Use it as a frontend for some kind of media player via KODI
Install as described above, but ditch the window manager stuff and install Kodi: https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Kodi. Configure it to run Kodi at boot and use it to stream media from your In-House Media server (plex, miniDLNA, maybe even a plain SMB-Share on your Desktop) as well as NetFlix, Prime, YouTube and whatever else the Kodi Appstore provides. Assuming the device has some kind of hardware video decoding capabilities, this will work fine, too, and this could make for a nice little entertainment device.

Bonus: Do all three
Install a display manager like LightDM, install all three of the above and choose what to do the fly. Might be a problem with the Storage, but maybe worth a try. You'd have to quit out of the respective UIs every time you choose to switch use cases, but that's like 5 seconds of waiting time or something like that.

All three of the above will do away with the headache of looking for touch-optimized window managers and on-screen keyboards and the like, and will give you an actual use out of the thing, at the expense of not being able to browse the web or do any general computing with it. And while you could still do any or all of the above with Mint or any other Distro, I'd still recommend Arch for this since a) you get the newest packages and patches that way, and b) it still installs way less unused packages than most Distros out there. Mint will install Cinnamon, and you'd then have to uninstall a lot of stuff you won't or can't use, and there's no guarantee you'll get your Mint install to the same pristine state as you'd get with a plain Arch installation.

[Yora]

I know, jt's junk. I'm not expecting any miracles.

For my typical purposes, it is currently "working" with Win10 1709. Writing text and reading forums isn't that bad. And it's certainly not going to replace any of my other devices.

I've been using Fedora since version 19, so I think Arch probably won't be that much more difficult. That 32 bit thing wasn't about performance, but that I saw somewhere that 64 bit just can't get installed on the thing, though who knows how true that actually is.

But what is fluxbox and what is it for?

[Whoracle]

Fedora is way more user friendly than plain Arch. But you'll see for yourself :)

As for fluxbox: It's a window manager without any bells and whistles.

Here's how the UI Stack in modern Operationg systems works (grossly oversimplified, of course):
First, any OS boots into some kind of shell environment. The shell environment then starts a display server - Xorg or Wayland in Linux' case. The Display Server by itself is really dumb and cannot do more than display Pixels on arbitrary positions on the screen, and maybe give you a few rendering primitives like "A Box". Usually, OSes then start a Display Manager (DM) like the aforementioned LightDM - it's where you input your username and password, for example. This step is optional under Linux, but in 99% of use cases there's a DM involved - in KDEs case it used to be KDM and nowadays it's SDDM, if I recall correctly. GNOME has GDM, and Mint/Cinnamon uses LightDM by default, I think.
The DM (or your Display Server directly) then starts what's called a Window Manager (WM for short). The WM takes care of all the window handling - multiple windows, Borders, Titlebars, minimizing, maximizing, all that stuff. KDE uses kwin as a window manager, GNOME uses iForget, and under windows this used to be explorer.exe (yes, the file manager. Don't ask...). Nowadays it's DWM under Windows, I think. Don't know what OSX/Mac uses.

Now, to complicate things further, KDE, Cinnamon and GNOME are what we call Desktop Environments (DEs): They provide a WM, a way to set the Desktop background, some fancy taskbars, tools and applets, maybe a file manager - they're designed to be whole suites of programs that give you a complete, unified desktop experience.

Fluxbox (and my aforementioned awesomewm*) are Window Managers - nothing more, nothing less. They handle window positioning, titlebars, keyboard input and not a whole lot else. In Fluxbox' case you can't even set the background - you'll need another tool for that. Fluxbox just provides window decorations and a taskbar and a right-click menu. This means it's very lightweight, since it doesn't install and launch a whole slew of extraneous tools. Each tool you want you'll have to install yourself - File Explorer, image viewer, Media Player, the works. That means it runs with a minimal overhead, but you'll loose a bunch of QoL features - no settings application, no way to configure tour displays etc.
There are a few other simple WMs like e.g. OpenBox that don't even provide a taskbar, but I found fluxbox to be the most usable of the bunch for beginners. Just two config files to manage - one for keyboard shortcuts and one for the menu, and it's blazingly fast and has small overhead. Just doesn't look too pretty with no transparency and almost no animations like "fade this window in" etc.

*In addition to all that, the window managers have opinions on how to handle windows - down to the whole concept of "Windows" itself. Awesomewm for example is what we call a "tiling" window manager that arranges all windows side-by-side to make the most of your Desktop. You can't overlap windows in a tiling manager. One window is always full screen, two windows are always half screen, three are one half and two quarter screens etc. Fluxbox and the "regular" WMs like KDE etc are what are called "floating" or "stacking" window managers, since they allow the windows to overlap or stack. Both approaches have their up- and downsides, but I fell in love with tiling a few years back. The first two or three weeks HURT, but afterwards you'll never want to go back :)

Since we're in the same timezone I can walk you through the basics via Jistsi or so, if you want. Don't know when I'll be free tonight, but I have the whole day free tomorrow.

[factotum]

If the problem was purely RAM then you don't need to do anything exotic--Ubuntu offers versions with both the XFCE (lightweight) and LXDE (SUPER lightweight) desktop environments. All 64-bit, of course, so if you genuinely can't install a 64-bit OS on this thing then that might be a problem.

[EDIT] Forgot to mention, been a while since I played around with Debian so I tried it this morning, and I couldn't even get it installed properly in the first place because it kept demanding firmware for the wireless adapter in my laptop, and no matter what I did I couldn't get it to recognise the files after I downloaded them. So, just as much of a pain as ever, not advised to use that one.

[Yora]

If the problem was purely RAM then you don't need to do anything exotic--Ubuntu offers versions with both the XFCE (lightweight) and LXDE (SUPER lightweight) desktop environments. All 64-bit, of course, so if you genuinely can't install a 64-bit OS on this thing then that might be a problem.

I don't know. All I know is that nothing happened when I had a stick with the latest Mint version plugged in.

[Whoracle]

If the problem was purely RAM then you don't need to do anything exotic--Ubuntu offers versions with both the XFCE (lightweight) and LXDE (SUPER lightweight) desktop environments. All 64-bit, of course, so if you genuinely can't install a 64-bit OS on this thing then that might be a problem.

Eh. LXDE I give you, and I'd recommend pilfering a few of its supplemental apps for fluxbox, too, especially lxappearance and lxrandr, sicne they usually only have GTK as dependencies. XFCE works fine with 4G of RAM, but for antyhing less it still loads too much cruft - depending on the use case, of course, and maybe it's gotten better since I last looked at it a few years ago.

[EDIT] Forgot to mention, been a while since I played around with Debian so I tried it this morning, and I couldn't even get it installed properly in the first place because it kept demanding firmware for the wireless adapter in my laptop, and no matter what I did I couldn't get it to recognise the files after I downloaded them. So, just as much of a pain as ever, not advised to use that one.

Seconded. Apart from running servers where you need the versions debian provides, I'd recommend basically anything else above Debian. It's rock solid, but outdated by design.

I don't know. All I know is that nothing happened when I had a stick with the latest Mint version plugged in.

Maybe Mint USB doesn't come with UEFI-Support? Try to switch to Legacy Boot/BIOS in the BIOS, if you can.

[factotum]

Maybe Mint USB doesn't come with UEFI-Support? Try to switch to Legacy Boot/BIOS in the BIOS, if you can.

It definitely does, I've installed it on machines with UEFI BIOS before. @Yora: I've just done a search, and I think your best bet if you genuinely need to use a 32-bit version of Linux is Zorin OS, given the problems with Debian. As far as I can tell it's completely up to date and still provides a 32-bit version. I'm pretty sure OpenSUSE used to do a 32-bit one as recently as last year, but it looks like they've gone 64-bit only now.

[Yora]

Thanks, that's great to know as a fallback option.

[Whoracle]

Also, there's https://archlinux32.org - don't know how good that's maintained, but it still might be an option.

[factotum]

I put Lubuntu (64-bit, obviously, you'd still have to use some other distro for 32-bit) on that laptop and so far it's worked fine. It's got a very Windows-like UI and, according to the QPS system monitor tool, was only using 360Mb of RAM immediately after a clean boot. Have to say the laptop feels pretty darned responsive with it installed as well--I opened Firefox to type this message while at the same time a Retropie install (pretty heavy on CPU and I/O, that) is running in a terminal window and it's smooth as butter. I suspect more intensive web sites like Youtube and Reddit maybe not so much, but I'm not primarily intending this laptop for those anyway, I have others better suited for that.

Note that Lubuntu is using the newer LXQt fork of the LXDE environment, not the original, I don't know how much of a difference that makes.

[EDIT] Have to say, as far as systems being lightweight are concerned, LXQt is pretty amazing for battery life if the indicator is to be believed. I'd get maybe 6-7 hours out of this machine under Windows 10, so far I've been using it for nearly 4 hours this morning and I still have 58% remaining!