Q4OS Forum

new2q4

Member

Registered: 2026-03-09

Posts: 8

Aquarius 32 bit installation so buggy as to be almost unusable

Greetings Everyone,

I spent much of the weekend installing and reinstalling and trying to set up the 32 bit version of Q4OS Aquarius on a little old 32 bit UEFI notebook of mine. A Medion Akoya from 2016.

First of all, I'm pretty glad that Q4OS exists, because of all the Linux distros I found in my online searches which still support 32 bit these days, Q4OS is the only one that I could actually install and then get to boot on that notebook. But once I boot for the first time after installing, the trouble starts.

First of all, there's a frequent bug where, either in text mode during bootup, or in graphical mode while I'm trying to log in, the screen suddenly turns completely blank except for a hyphen in the top left corner, and at the same time, the laser on my mouse turns off. When that happens, I can usually, but not always, make it stop by pressing a random key on my keyboard, though of course I have to be careful about which key I press. Once I've logged in and followed the first post-login instructions, it usually doesn't happen any more, but it still happens again during the next boot.

But that's just an annoyance. What's more serious is that from the second bootup onwards, the system usually crashes or hangs up while booting, with the screen getting stuck at one of the technical report lines. And it's rarely ever the same technical report line, so I can't even report "it always crashes when it says x."

That last part makes it basically impossible to use the notebook now. Recovery mode doesn't help, because even when I can boot in recovery mode, at the point where it says something like "press Enter to go on," nothing happens when I press Return (the notebook doesn't have an Enter key.)

For background, I've been using other Linuxes for about 20 years now, and I'd rate myself as an intermediate level user. I recently switched from dual boot to Linux only, and this is my attempt to use Linux on the last computer I own that had still been running Windows.

Any ideas?

q4osteam

Q4OS Team

Registered: 2015-12-06

Posts: 6,106

Website

Re: Aquarius 32 bit installation so buggy as to be almost unusable

Welcome to the forum

... the system usually crashes or hangs up while booting, with the screen getting stuck at one of the technical report lines. And it's rarely ever the same technical report line ...

That looks like a hardware issue. We recommend checking your RAM for hardware errors first.

new2q4

Member

Registered: 2026-03-09

Posts: 8

Re: Aquarius 32 bit installation so buggy as to be almost unusable

Welcome to the forum

... the system usually crashes or hangs up while booting, with the screen getting stuck at one of the technical report lines. And it's rarely ever the same technical report line ...

That looks like a hardware issue. We recommend checking your RAM for hardware errors first.

Thanks! Is there a way to check my RAM while the one OS I can get to work on the system works the way I described?

new2q4

Member

Registered: 2026-03-09

Posts: 8

Re: Aquarius 32 bit installation so buggy as to be almost unusable

Afterthought: The "hard drive", so to say, of that notebook is an SD card. Could it be a problem that the system is using a partition on an SD card as swap?

new2q4

Member

Registered: 2026-03-09

Posts: 8

Re: Aquarius 32 bit installation so buggy as to be almost unusable

Made myself a memtest thumb drive after researching my question. Currently testing.

q4osteam

Q4OS Team

Registered: 2015-12-06

Posts: 6,106

Website

Re: Aquarius 32 bit installation so buggy as to be almost unusable

The "hard drive", so to say, of that notebook is an SD card. Could it be a problem that the system is using a partition on an SD card as swap?

Short answer is no, while the SD card has no hardware errors, bad blocks.

RAM test with MemTest86, steps:
Download MemTest86 https://www.memtest86.com/download.htm
Use the included tool to create a bootable USB
Restart the laptop
Boot from the USB (usually F8 / F10 / F12 boot menu)
Let the test run
Test duration
1 pass: ~20–40 minutes
4 passes (recommended): 2–3 hours

new2q4

Member

Registered: 2026-03-09

Posts: 8

Re: Aquarius 32 bit installation so buggy as to be almost unusable

First MemTest pass reported no errors.

While I'm waiting for the results of the other three MemTest passes, does anyone know how I could check if the problem is with the SD card? Is there perhaps something a bit like MemTest, except for drives instead of RAM?

new2q4

Member

Registered: 2026-03-09

Posts: 8

Re: Aquarius 32 bit installation so buggy as to be almost unusable

Turns out I had been wrong all the time: doing some further diagnostics on the notebook showed that it's actually 64 bit. Could that have explained the bugs? I still have other problems with it, but I'm starting a new thread for those, because the title of this one seems no longer appropriate.