User:Vokiel/Razer-Blade-15-2020

Razer Blade 15 Base Model (Early 2020) Installation Log
This page is an installation log of gentoo linux on a Razer Blade 15 Base Model with an OLED. I won't go into detailed technical explanations in this log. I may drop a number of links which may eventually die and become inaccessible. I will however document everything that I've done, what worked well and what didn't. I will try to log everything in a neutral position as much as possible. I'll set my own requirements, and make my own choices. Some of which will most likely be wrong, so don't take this page as a Guide without asking for multiple opinions on it. If you find some problematic setup, don't hesitate to share it under the Discussions tab.

This is the product string I get from dmidecode:

Requirements

 * 1) Must not dual boot Windows or any other system.
 * 2) Must use an EFI boot partition on a GPT disk.
 * 3) Must use an LVM partition setup on top of LUKS.
 * 4) Must use a key file to unlock the LUKS partition from a USB thumb drive or key.
 * 5) Must be able to suspend/hibernate
 * 6) Must use the Nvidia proprietary driver with Optimus.
 * 7) Should use OpenRC
 * 8) Should use OpenRazer
 * 9) Should use IWD with ConnMan on Enlightment.

Making a Bootable EFI USB Key
Originally from Sakaki's EFI Install Guide

All the above worked fine, however I had to use a different key server (hkps.pool.sks-keyservers.net) to retrieve the public key from Gentoo Release Engineering. Found this domain on some random forum post. Booting the Razer was successful with the livecd prompt showing up.

Connecting to the Network
Basically followed the Network Guide, but this always fails on WIFI for various reasons. My network is under WPA-PSK, so I used net-setup and followed the setup wizard. This gave me an Unreachable Network problem, which I had to fix by adding the default gateway manually with:

Creating the Partitions
LVM will be used on this laptop, so only 2 partitions are really needed: The standard EFI partition required for booting in UEFI mode and the actual Luks encrypted partition that will contain all other partitions.

With fdisk, we create a new GPT partition table and dump whatever was there before (g). After, it's simply a matter of creating an EFI partition (n, default, default, +512M, t, 1) and then an extended Linux Filesystem partition. (n, default, default, default)