Installed Peppermint Linux on Lenovo Ideapad S100

I am presently at Bhopal and these people have Lenovo Ideapad S100 with Windows 7. Last time I had tried antiX Linux on USB boot on this machine.

This time I found that they had to reformat the disk and reinstall Windows 7 which was not working well.

When I boot this Laptop on Windows 7 there were auto key presses of space bar for sometime. Afterwards I could use it but space bar did not produce "space". I had to use onscreen keyboard for typing "space".

I decided to try Linux on the machine and since it has only 2 GB RAM I decided to try Peppermint Linux.

I downloaded Peppermint 9 (32 bit), checked md5sum, bought SanDisk from local market and made bootable usb disk using Rufus.

This Laptop is not friendly for USB booting. On Lenovo Laptops pressing F12 is supposed to show boot menu but the Laptop does not have F12 key and suppose to work with Fn+F11 but Fn does not work on BIOS.

I pressed F2 to enter the BIOS Set up but there is no option to bring up the USB boot option above HDD boot, however, the BIOS suggests that you could disable HDD boot option by putting "x" after selecting it and pressing x key.

After disabling HDD boot I could boot from USB. The Space Bar key did not work on Live Peppermint Desktop and I had to install "onboard" to get onscreen keyboard.

Even then I decided to install Peppermint in dual boot with Windows 7.

After install and booting Peppermint Desktop once again I had to install "onboard" and use it for space bar.

After applying all updates, however, I find that the Space Bar key is working.

Mission successful.

Using antiX live usb on Lenovo Ideapad S100.

I am presently at Bhopal and the family has Lenovo Ideapad S100 Netbook with Windows 7. I had made usb stick with latest antiX-15 which I decided to try on this netbook.

On this Netbook pressing F12 on boot is supposed to bring Boot Menu but it did not work (may be because F12 is actually Fn+F11 and Fn key may not be working on boot).

Pressing F2 however brings the BIOS Set up. In BIOS Set up Boot Tag I could see the USB Stick but there is no provision to bring it up and make it first boot device.

But I could disable booting from Hard Disk (first boot device) by putting a "x" by pressing "x" key and save settings.

Then I could boot from USB and  now posting this on Iceweasel (Open Source Firefox) on antiX-15.

This machine has 2 GB RAM and antiX is very fast.