HowTo: install Ubuntu 24.04.1 LTS on an Acer TravelMate 8473

Support and Help
,
1

I managed to install Ubuntu 24.04.1 LTS on an Acer TravelMate 8473 with Bios Version 1.23. (Intel Core i5-2450M 2x 2.5GHz, 4GB RAM and and 32 GB SSD)
It seems to run smoothly. I couldn’t make it work with UEFI, so I forced Ubuntu to install in BIOS mode. One or two steps may be redundant, but these steps finally worked for me.

  1. Build an Ubuntu Installer USB stick using rufus with MBR partition scheme.
  2. Remove EFI folder and .efi files from it
  3. Plug it into the TravelMate
  4. Boot the TravelMate and open BIOS (F2)
  5. Set a supervisor password (Security tab)
  6. Disable TPM (Boot tab)
  7. Select the USB drive as primary boot source and the HDD as secondary boot.
  8. Close the bios saving changes.
  9. Now you should see the GRUB boot menu
  10. Edit the “install ubuntu” entry pressing “e”
  11. Replace “quiet splash” with “noefi” and press ctrl+x to run Ubuntu
  12. Now Ubuntu should boot without any issues.
  13. I partitioned the SSD with gparted before starting the installer, doing it from the installation app should also work. You need to ensure that
    a. The disk has a MBR (MSDOS) partition table, not GPT
    b. There is no /boot/efi entry
  14. I added 8GB swap
  15. The rest is formatted as ext4 and mounted to “/”

from there on the installation should be straight forward.

Hope this helps and if anybody knows how to get a working driver for the NVIDIA GT 540M, please let me know!

1 Like