After watching some of the “Small Form Factor PCs” videos, I purchased a Beelink SER5 5560U mini PC. Although I’ve built two (tower) PCs, being a software developer I haven’t really kept up with hardware like monitors. So I also bought an Acer SB220Q monitor with a max resolution of 1920x1080 @ 75Hz.
I want to install Linux on the SER5, so I tried pressing F7 to get to the boot options menu. The result is best exemplified by the following post by someone else with the same problem, on the Beelink forums under thread 87322, titled " SER5 PRO ‘Input Not Supported’ screen on bios boot". As you may see if you look at the forum, the response isn’t helpful. I tried emailing Beelink support and their responses have been almost equally unhelpful.
I also tried using a ViewSonic monitor and it displayed “Out of range”. It seems that during boot, the SER5’s video signal is higher than the max resolution supported by the Acer or ViewSonic monitors. When I didn’t press F7, the Windows 11 setup process managed to “negotiate” the signal down to the Acer’s max resolution and I was able to install Windows and the SER5 works fine with it. However, I’m still unable to get to the boot options menu in order to install Linux, nor to the BIOS setup (accessible through the Delete key) to tweak anything.
I presume that the only solution with the Acer monitor, would be if Beelink were to provide a changed BIOS that would do something equivalent to what the Windows setup is able to do. Alternatively, I could try to replace the SB220Q by a monitor that supports a higher resolution, but I’d like to have a better guideline than simply “higher”, i.e., something more specific like 1440p or 4K.
Thanks for any suggestions.