This is meant to be a half how-to guide and half review of the HP Stream 13.
First off, this is a budget laptop. It retails in BestBuy for about $230 in the US
There are other versions of the HP Stream notebook, but they all have the exact same internals, just different sizes (11 and 13) and one of the 13" models has a touchscreen.
Specs:
Intel Celeron N2840
2gb DDR3 RAM (Non-Upgradable)
32gb eMMC Flash Storage
13.3" 1366x768 Matte Display
Also, all of the components are soldered to the motherboard in a MacBook Air fashion, so if you're thinking about buying this as a cheap laptop and upgrading it down the line you'll be poorly mistaken.
I was awarded this laptop as a prize in a contest for work (I may or may not work at HP (cough cough Logan and Wendell, y'all should totally PM me cough cough), and being that it was so low powered I'd never use it with Windows 8.1 that it came from the factory with. So naturally I installed Ubuntu. I installed the GNOME remix, fuck that Unity POS, GNOME 2 is the only way to do it.
Installing it was quite a pain compared to other laptops I've installed Ubuntu on before. Previously I installed it on an HP Envy Touchsmart 15-something, and it went without practically any hiccups. This time it was a bit different, mostly because of the 32gb eMMC storage it uses as the main hard drive.
I should also mention that this is how I did it, that doesn't mean that it's the best/easiest way to do it. Most of this was done through about six hours of trial and error. And this guide is assuming that you know how to create a bootable flash drive installation of Ubuntu.
Sooooo, step 1: Boot into the BIOS, disable Secure Boot, enable Legacy Mode
Step 2: Save and reboot into the flash drive.
At this point in my installation it took a good bit of trial and error. I tried every combination of booting into the Live CD, then starting the installer/Booting straight into the installer. I even tried doing an OEM install but this is the only combination that worked.
-First boot into the Live CD (booting will take a while, so grab some coffee)
-Open up the terminal
-Type in the command sudo gparted
This will open up the program GParted, it's a graphical hard drive partitioning software. Basically, we want to erase the first hard drive completely before we even start installing Ubuntu. For some reason the installer will quit if you don't format the hard drive first and leave it all blank space.
-Make sure that you have the drive /dev/mmcblk0 selected. The eMMC drive has four partitions originally, three of them are allocated 4mb of random storage. Before I started this whole adventure I saw a bunch of people saying that they were having trouble installing Ubuntu and other Linux's because the eMMC had partitions that aren't erasable, which is true, but we can completely erase Windows which frees up space and makes boot times faster.
Once you've erased all of the partitions dev/mmcblk0, save your changes and reboot the laptop. This time boot into the installation part of the install disk. From here you do a basic installation, just keep these things in mind:
-Don't connect the laptop to your WiFi yet, it will make the installer freeze longer than it usually takes
-Obviously you can't download updates because you don't have your WiFi connected, but leave the "download updates" and "Install 3rd party software" options unchecked as well.
Now, when I said that connecting the WiFi would make the installer freeze longer than normal, I mean the installer itself will freeze, but you just have to let it run it's course. I've personally never had an issue with a Ubuntu installer freezing on me this long since I was installing it on the first computer I ever owned (A custom built Pentium III hand-me-down from a family friend that used it as his old gaming rig). Rebooting the laptop mid-installation will only make more trouble for you, my recommendation is to just wait it out. If the installer goes through without any hiccups, the whole process should only take about 45 minutes to an hour.
Expect for the installer to freeze here
After you get past that screen select the hard drive (the 29.whatever gigabyte one), and click next. Expect it to freeze again.
If you get this error, it means that you didn't delete all the partitions on the hard drive the first time. You'll have to quit the installer and go back into the Live CD, reopen GParted and free up the entire hard drive again.
After the partitioning it set-up correctly, you should see this screen
Just select the largest partition and click "Install Now"
And if you see this it means it installed correctly!
After this all you have to do is go back into the BIOS and change the hard drive boot settings to allow GRUB to boot first instead of the Windows boot loader and you're set! I've got it working practically flawlessly, I'm typing this from the laptop right now. Oh, and if any of y'all were wondering about the battery life, I was able to do this entire installation and write this guide on a single charge, I didn't plug it in at all and it has about 11% left.
I hope this is a helps some of y'all out. Let me know if you have any questions!
~DoctorLumpy