Ubuntu 16.10 on the HP Stream 7

Yesterday I finally got sick of windows 10 and installed Ubuntu 16.10 on the HP Stream 7. There are load of instructions out there to install earlier versions, but nothing up to date.

Intel created a world of pain when it introduced 32bit UEFI for 64bit machines, the Stream 7 is one of many Baytrail devices that have this ridiculous boot firmware configuration. Linux distros have completely ignore this boot combination and 3 years after these devices started appearing haven't started to ship the bootia32.efi files on the install media.

Thankfully there are people spinning builds with the correct media and a whole load of drivers to help support silly little Intel convertible tablet things. I used Linuxium's Ubuntu 16.10 build. I flashed it to a USB stick and used my awesome little otg usb hub to connect the install media. I did have to disable secure boot in the bios to get the media to boot.

I needed a separate keyboard for the install, but the touch screen and WiFi worked out of the box. The hardware support is okay, there is no screen brightness control out of the box and suspend is missing. I spent a while setting up the on screen keyboard onboard , it looks like I am going to have to create my own layout to get a split keyboard.

The install was painless, much much easier than the Baytrail device I tried to use ubuntu on in 2014. It does still baffle me that distros don't have boot support for these devices on the installers.

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