HP EliteDesk 800 G2 Mini Desktop PC running Linux – Week 1

Last Updated on May 5, 2021

Installing Manjaro

A Linux distribution (often abbreviated as distro) is an operating system made from a software collection that is based upon the Linux kernel and, often, a package management system. Linux has many hundreds of different distros. Some distros deploy a rolling release system where its constantly updated in all aspects: from the software packages, desktop environment, to the kernel. Other distros use a point release system where installation images are published on a fixed schedule. Manjaro is an example of a rolling release system while Ubuntu uses a point release system.

We generally prefer point release distributions as long as they offer recent software. We’ve settled on Ubuntu as our main distro. But as we are testing the Lenovo M93 with Manjaro, we’ll continue with that distro for the HP EliteDesk 800 G2. The decision which one(s) to use is largely dictated by your own requirements and preferences.

Manjaro ticks most of the boxes. They offer editions with different desktops (XFCE, KDE Plasma, and GNOME). Overall, we prefer GNOME as it offers a modern, attractive, yet simple desktop.

Each and every time you press your PC’s power button, the BIOS is the first operation to load your operating system and all of the personal settings that make your computer your own. By default, the HP machine goes through its self-test startup too quickly, so we can had to enter the BIOS through Windows 10’s advanced start menu recovery settings.

In the BIOS we disabled Fast Boot, Secure Boot, and chose to boot from a USB key. Although not necessary to install Manjaro, we also enabled Virtualization Technology (VT-X) and Virtualization Technology for Directed I/O (VT-d). This is because we’ll be testing virtualization in a later article in this series.

After saving these changes, we proceeded to remove Windows 10 from the machine and installed Manjaro. Probably the simplest method is to install the new operating system with a bootable USB key.

Installing Manjaro on the HP EliteDesk is straightforward. Download Manjaro from their website. Then create a bootable USB stick with Manjaro written to it using utility software (such as Etcher), set the BIOS to boot from USB (press F10 to access the BIOS when starting the machine). Then boot from the USB stick and install Manjaro. Everything proceeded as expected. If you’re new to Linux, Bargain Hardware will install Fedora, Ubuntu, Debian, or FreeBSD for you.

If you like to tinker with the BIOS and have accidentally re-enabled the Fast Boot option, we can still access the BIOS from Manjaro by issuing the command:

$ systemctl reboot --firmware-setup

There’s a few things we usually recommend with a new system. The first thing is to create and initialize a file to hold the swap. It’s more convenient than using a dedicated swap partition. While the HP has 16GB of RAM, we still recommend creating an 8GB swapfile. Issue the commands:

$ sudo fallocate -l 8G /swapfile
$ sudo mkswap /swapfile
$ sudo chmod u=rw,go= /swapfile
$ sudo swapon /swapfile
$ sudo bash -c "echo /swapfile none swap defaults 0 0 >> /etc/fstab"

We always change the graphics driver and install libva-utils, a collection of tests for VA-API (VIdeo Acceleration API).

$ sudo pacman -S libva-intel-driver libva-utils

We’re not a fan of the Manjaro graphical branding displaying in a terminal (and this can cause problems with some terminal emulators). The simplest fix is to change the default shell. Issue the command:

$ chsh -l

There’s four shells available on a default install: sh, bash, zsh, and git-shell. We changed the shell to bash with the command:

$ chsh -s /bin/bash

Then restart the system.

We recommend installing at least 2 kernels on your system. If, for any reason, a kernel fails to boot, there’s an alternative working kernel to boot and repair the system. It’s the quickest way to rectify an issue.

Manjaro provides a very useful program called Manjaro Settings Manager (pictured below) which removes the pain of installing new kernels. It’s one of the highlights of the distro. Besides installing kernels, the program configures other aspects of the system such as language packs, user accounts, keyboard settings, and hardware configuration.

We installed 5 kernels (4 of which are shown in the image below).

We can then choose a specific kernel by pressing the Escape key when booting the system.

Next week, we’ll put the HP EliteDesk 800 G2 through some benchmarks.

Page 1 – Introduction
Page 2 – Specifications
Page 3 – Installing Manjaro

Complete list of articles in this series:

This blog is written on the HP EliteDesk 800 G2 Mini Desktop PC.

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