How to dual-boot HP Omen 15 laptop (Windows 10 + Ubuntu)

The HP Omen laptop, which luckily looks better in real life than on pictures

This guide is intended for owners of HP Omen 15 (2019) laptops to help them install Windows 10 alongside Ubuntu 18.04, as there are several obstacles with limited documentation.

I am mainly writing this as a future reference for myself. This guide thus comes with no warranties: it is just a list of steps and links to resources that helped me complete this dual-boot installation process.

Update: Keep in mind that this guide is written for the 2019 version of HP Omen 15 and Ubuntu 18.04, both of which now have more recent versions. This guide may not (completely) work for these newer versions, but might help you on your dual-booting quest.

Creating a Ubuntu Boot Drive

You will need a USB drive with at least 4GB and a computer with Windows 10. You could use your HP Omen for this or any other computer. Follow all instructions of this tutorial to create your bootable Ubuntu USB stick: https://tutorials.ubuntu.com/tutorial/tutorial-create-a-usb-stick-on-windows#0

Freeing up space for Ubuntu

On Windows, tab the Windows icon and type to search for “Create and format hard disk partitions”. Find your main Windows drive, usually called “OS (C:)”. Press right mouse button on that partition and select “Shrink Volume”. Input in “Enter the amount of space to shrink in MB” what you like the size of your Ubuntu partition to be. For me, I chose to shrink it with 200 000 MB and still keep about 300 000 MB for my Windows partition.

This video also explains this from 1m50 to 2m50: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u5QyjHIYwTQ

If you want to use your second HDD (so NOT the one you just shrank) on your Ubuntu, you need to make sure that it uses the NTFS format. If this is not yet the case, you could format the drive in this format from this disk manager program. This means you will lose all the data on that drive, so make sure to make back-ups if you have important data on it.

Changing laptop’s boot settings

Restart your computer, en repeatedly press F10 to get into the boot menu of HP Omen laptop. Go to boot options and enable “Legacy boot”. This will also disable “Secure boot”, if not, disable “Secure boot” manually. You will need this in order to be able to boot Ubuntu.

Now go to “Boot order” and drag the option mentioning USB to the top of the boot order.

Installing Ubuntu

Put the bootable Ubuntu USB stick in your computer if you removed it, and restart your computer. The computer should now boot from your stick and give you the option to install Ubuntu. Pressing this option WILL NOT WORK due to incompatibilities with your hardware, namely the nouveau video drivers as well as PCI issues giving rise to ACPI Boot error if you were to press this option.

To fix this, simply press “e” on your keyboard while being on the “Install Ubuntu” option. Then, on the second to last line after the words quite splash, type pci=nommconf modprobe.blacklist=nouveau. This will allow you to start the installation process by disabling the nouveau driver and avoiding the ACPI Boot error.

You can then install Ubuntu as explained in this video: https://youtu.be/u5QyjHIYwTQ?t=290. I chose as “Installation type” to do “Something Else”. Then selected the free area that you freed up earlier on Windows, used the area created a swap partition by selecting “use as: swap area” with a size of 8000MB, and the remaining as a “Logical” partition on mount point “/”. Then finish the rest of installation.

When the installation is finished, restart the computer and repeatedly press F10 to get into the boot menu. Change the boot order such that the normal order is restored (put USB boot below the OS drive).

Installing Nvidia drivers

Restart the computer, and when entering the screen to open Ubuntu, press “e” to edit the start up command, and again add after quite splash the extra arguments pci=nommconf modprobe.blacklist=nouveau.

Now start Ubuntu, press the Windows key and open “Software and Updates”. Click the “Additional Drivers” tab and select “Using NVIDIA driver metapackage from nvidia-driver-435 (proprietary, tested)”. This will download the Nvidia driver and ensure that you don’t have to blacklist nouveau in the arguments again. Although you could also additionally completely blacklist nouveau in case it raises more issues by following the steps specified on https://askubuntu.com/a/951892.

Customizing Grub

Since you don’t want to type pci=nommcon every time you log into Ubuntu, let’s customize grub, the screen you see when booting that lets you select the operating system.

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:danielrichter2007/grub-customizer
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install grub-customizer

Now open Grub Customizer from your applications. On the first screen, you can put the Windows Boot Manager on top if you prefer. In “General Settings” you can choose to always select the “previously booted entry” first, and decrease the number of seconds before booting this entry by decreasing the seconds after “Boot default entry after … seconds”. The most important setting here is that you should change the kernel parameters from quiet splash to quiet splash pci=nommconf. This will ensure that your Ubuntu will just boot after a restart without editing these pesky arguments any more.

Minor finishing tweaks

Fixing time

Windows and Ubuntu use the internal clock of your computer in different ways. To fix this, type the following in your Ubuntu terminal (open using Ctrl+Alt+T):

timedatectl set-local-rtc 1 --adjust-system-clock

Then, restart your computer, go to Windows, click on the time, open the time settings and press “Sync time”. This will restore the Windows time. After these steps, both should indicate the right time

Fixing date language

On Ubuntu, my calendar was suddenly in German. This is fixable by going to Regional Formats in Language support, selecting English there and applying it to the whole system.

Fixing rotating screen

When you rotate your laptop physically, your screen might switch orientation (why this is even a feature on this laptop I have no clue). To solve this, lock the screen using the following commands:

gsettings set org.gnome.settings-daemon.peripherals.touchscreen orientation-lock true
gsettings set org.gnome.settings-daemon.plugins.orientation active false

Fixing weird lid shut behaviour

Upon closing the lid of your laptop, you might experience weird behavior such as airplane mode turning on. To prevent your laptop from taking actions upon closing the lid, type into your terminal:

sudo gedit /etc/systemd/logind.conf

And then change the line beginning with #HandleLidSwitchto #HandleLidSwitch=ignore

[Optional] Ease-of-use tweaks

Mounting drive

Since this laptop has two drives, you can make the HDD more easily accessible in Ubuntu by following this guide (although it should already be accessible given that you formatted the drive in NTFS earlier): https://www.howtogeek.com/howto/35807/how-to-harmonize-your-dual-boot-setup-for-windows-and-ubuntu/

Setting explorer hotkey

One of my most used keyboard shortcuts in Windows is Windows key + E to open Explorer. Ubuntu does not provide this by default, but if you open the Keyboard settings, you can click on Home folder and then press Windows key + E to assign this shortcut.

Getting a nicer theme

The default Ubuntu UI looks quite bad in my opinion, especially after being used to the Windows style. Luckely, you can make your Ubuntu look more like Windows. To give yourself a task bar that looks more like the Windows task bar, just run

sudo apt install gnome-shell-extensions gnome-shell-extension-dash-to-panel gnome-tweaks adwaita-icon-theme-full

Afterwards, open Tweaks and under Extensions, select “Dash to Panel”. You can further customize these by pressing the cog symbols.

To get rid of the ugly orange colors of default Ubuntu, activate shell themes by following this guide: http://ubuntuhandbook.org/index.php/2017/05/enable-shell-theme-in-gnome-tweak-tool-in-ubuntu/

Then, install a theme, like for example the Arc theme & icons:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:noobslab/themes
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install arc-theme
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:noobslab/icons
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install arc-icons

After installing these, open the Tweaks menu again, log out and back in, and select the ArcDark theme and ArcDark icons in the first screen.

End

That’s it. Ubuntu and Windows 10 should now be running smoothly next to each other. Hope these steps worked and that this guide was useful for you! :)