First, perform due diligence. You need a Linux distro with a recent kernel to handle the Vega 11 graphics. I tested Ubuntu 19.04, Xubuntu 19.04 and OpenSUSE Leap 15.1. These three all handled it just fine, but Xubuntu was the only one that could put the display to sleep. That’s what I went with for keeps.
You’ll need to read this support document from HP to boot from anything but Win10 on the hard drive. Take notes and walk through the complicated rigmarole to set the system to boot from either the DVD or a USB jump drive.
Everything after that should be pretty routine. However, once the system is installed, if you check dmesg, you’ll see your logs filling up with an error something like this:
pcieport 0000:00:01.2: AER: Corrected error received: 0000:00:01.0 pcieport 0000:00:01.2: PCIe Bus Error: severity=Corrected, type=Data Link Layer, (Transmitter ID) pcieport 0000:00:01.2: device [1022:15d3] error status/mask=00001000/00006000 pcieport 0000:00:01.2: [12] Timeout
I’ve run into this a lot lately on fresh Linux installations. There’s nothing you can do to fix whatever the Linux kernel thinks is wrong with the hardware or BIOS. HP doesn’t even make it possible to complain about this. Since the kernel is handling this error well enough, the only solution for now is set a boot parameter that will silence the reporting. The official Ubuntu documentation is here; scroll down to “Permanently Add a Kernel Boot Parameter” for this task.
Or, if you are comfortable with the terminal:
sudo nano /etc/default/grub
Add this one expression to the end of the kernel parameters line:
pci=noaer
This should be enough to silence excessive error reporting on that issue until someone comes up with a better plan. After that, do the sudo update-grub and reboot.
The other issue is that the built-in wifi on this system doesn’t work out of the box. That’s because the Linux kernel does not yet support the RTL8821CE chipset. You can find the source code online and build the module yourself if you really need it. The pertinent instruction for Ubuntu is here.
Everything else is working just fine for me. I haven’t tested the Bluetooth, but the system claims it’s ready to rock-n-roll. Linux says the Ryzen 5 is an octo-core, and it’s pretty fast with Xubuntu 19.04. I plan to keep rolling with the successive releases until the next LTS at 20.04.
