Installing Linux Mint on a Windows 10 Lenovo laptop

Before entering the live USB you need to ensure the fast startup power setting is disabled, so that the machine fully powers off. To my understanding, you do so as otherwise when you exit the live USB via 'shut down' it won't actually shut down and you'll have to hard power off the machine (no bueno).

• Go to 'Power Options' > 'System Settings' ("change what the power buttons do")
• "Change settings that are currently unavailable" to allow you to uncheck "turn on fast startup (recommended)"
• Picture guide here: https://winaero.com/how-to-disable-or-enable-fast-startup-in-windows-8-1/

After burning a live USB onto a flash drive, I booted and found the keyboard wasn’t working. I used the on-screen virtual keyboard (under Accessibility in the settings) to type into the Terminal (via)

xinput list

This lists the input devices, and in my case the keyboard (“AT Translated Set 2 keyboard”) was id number 12, meaning I could enable it with:

xinput --set-prop 12 "Device Enabled" 1

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What to do if the keyboard isn't in the xinput list

After exiting and re-entering the live USB, I found the keyboard was no longer in the input list.

As mentioned in this question it takes 10 minutes or so (in which time I tried pressing buttons like Alt + Tab, Enter, etc.) before the keyboard shows in the list. This indeed showed up in the dmesg output.

In fact, the keyboard was enabled at this point, and I didn't need to use the xinput --set-prop command!

Various approaches put forward here and here include:

GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="i8042.direct i8042.dumbkbd"

One answer says that LED functionality can be preserved by:

GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="quiet splash i8042.reset"

Elsewhere it's proposed to check compatibility with dmesg | grep i8042, which gives me a few lines including one saying

PS/2 appears to have AUX port disabled, if this is incorrect please boot with i8042.nopnp

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The keyboard worked but the trackpad ("Glass sense touchpad") did not, only the touch screen. This suggested editing the grub file (sudo xed /etc/default/grub)

GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="psmouse.synaptics_intertouch=0 quiet splash"