Trying to load a debian live image from a usb.

[Elliot Hallmark]

Short question:

Using a refind usb with a debian live iso on it, I was able to autodetect the vmlinuz. Running it, I get

Starting vmlinuz1
Using load options 'initrd=live\initrd1.img'

and it freezes. Is there a way to get more information about what's going wrong?

Long version:

So, I'm a little bit over my head trying to boot linux on an tablet with an Intel Oak Trail chipset. It has a 32-bit EFI. I have both a debian live usb and a net install usb. Both freeze when I try to boot them. ReFind has been easier to work with than GRUB, so I created a ReFind USB with an ext2 partition, and have tried copying the files from the iso onto that partition. The kernels show up in autofind, but still freeze the system. I doubt this is an okay way to do this, but I'm unsure about going about getting anything linux to boot on this. I expect to have to cross-compile a kernel at some point, but I'd feel better about going down that route if I could get something to start to boot and print some error messages at atleast. Any advice is appreciated.

Thanks,
Elliot

[Roderick W. Smith]

I'm afraid that few (perhaps no) Linux distributions provide explicit support for your configuration (a 32-bit EFI-bootable distribution). In the past, there's been little demand for this setup because so few computers have used it -- mainly just the first couple generations of Intel-based Macs. Recent EFI-based tablets may be changing that, but AFAIK the distribution providers have yet to respond.

In any event, what you're trying to do can be done, but it requires a fair amount of expertise. I started to write up detailed instructions at one point, but it started getting pretty complex, so I abandoned that document. Maybe I should pick it up again.... Anyhow, I did write some general comments about it on AskUbuntu:

http://askubuntu.com/questions/392719/32-bit-uefi-boot-support

What I wrote there applies as well to Debian. In brief, what you need to do is to locate the boot loader configuration file for your disk's BIOS-mode boot loader, study it, and replicate the options that are passed to the kernel using rEFInd. You can do this either in a one-off way by hitting F2 or Insert twice rather than Enter so that you can edit the kernel options; or you can create a refind_linux.conf file in the kernel directory or create a manual boot stanza in refind.conf so that you can easily re-launch the installer if you want to do so.