Ubuntu, EFI and Acer

A while ago I found myself in front of my little baby-notebooks screen telling me in no uncertain terms, that “No Bootable Device (was) found”. Hmm. Somehow I remembered that. I also remembered that it’s just a little renaming routine that would solve this annoying issue.

The problem in short: Most Acer notebooks expect the UEFI-entry named Linux instead of any other name and Ubuntu names it’s entry ubuntu on installation. Why the confusion? Who knows. Probably just self-preservation on Acer’s side, because who knows what people might do to the precious little notebook while not using a fully licensed and price increasing Windows.

The following steps should solve this issue:

• Install Ubuntu (or any other OS you like).
• After the installation reboot into the Live-CD or USB-stick that you installed the system from.
• Mount your EFI partition (let’s assume it’s mounted at /media/EFI).
• Go into /media/EFI/EFI and ls -al the contents of the directory.
• You should see a directory named ubuntu. Either copy it to the folder Linux or rename it to Linux, depending on your adventurism level.
• Reboot and Ubuntu should boot up.

I wonder why this is not something that Ubuntu could somehow do itself on a new installation.

A more verbose description of the problem can be found here.