The ASUS "Bay Trail" T100 Is Not Linux Friendly

[phoronix]

Phoronix: The ASUS "Bay Trail" T100 Is Not Linux Friendly

Last week I bought the ASUS Transformer Book T100TA, which is one of the first Intel "Bay Trail" devices in the United States. At a cost of $399 USD, it isn't as cheap as some Bay Trail devices talked up by Intel, but I was eager to see how the "Valley View" graphics would perform and all-around how this Atom SoC would run under Linux. Sadly, the ASUS T100TA appears to be a crap wreck at this point for running Linux...

http://www.phoronix.com/vr.php?view=MTQ5NzE

[guido12]

Hopefully it isn't like this for other Bay Trail ultraportables. Otherwise, my plan of getting a Linux friendly ultra-mobile device is going to be postponed.

[darren.l]

It's a long shot but...

Not sure if you have run into this before, but on my wife's Acer I had to put in a BIOS password for all options before it would let me turn off the secure boot and then put UEFI back to legacy bios, but at that point Linux installed like a charm. Not sure if the Asus even has that option, can't tell from the screens in the article. Like I said, still a long shot...Good luck. Just read online, no legacy options. Damn.

BTW your captcha to register is terrible to navigate, the images suck to i.d.

[GreatEmerald]

Welcome to the world of firmware issues, where companies keep releasing super broken firmware.

One thing to try is to replace Windows' bootmgfw.efi with the GRUB2 one. Although doing that off Windows itself might not work all that well...

[[Knuckles]]

Glad to know this, I was seriously thinking of picking one up, but it's sad it's such crap.

[birdie]

I'm a lot more interested to know if Asus is going to release a native Android for it.

This thing is meant to be a tablet - it's not a laptop for Linux.

With just 2GB (there's no way to expand it) of RAM T100 is useless both for Windows 8 and for Linux.

[DanL]

With just 2GB of RAM T100 is useless both for Windows 8 and for Linux.

Nonsense. That's more than enough RAM for using Linux (and probably Windows 8 as well) to do tasks you would do on a tablet.

[BSDude]

I'm a lot more interested to know if Asus is going to release a native Android for it.

This thing is meant to be a tablet - it's not a laptop for Linux.

With just 2GB (there's no way to expand it) of RAM T100 is useless both for Windows 8 and for Linux.

Fire up a puppy

[paperwastage]

Phoronix: The ASUS "Bay Trail" T100 Is Not Linux Friendly

Last week I bought the ASUS Transformer Book T100TA, which is one of the first Intel "Bay Trail" devices in the United States. At a cost of $399 USD, it isn't as cheap as some Bay Trail devices talked up by Intel, but I was eager to see how the "Valley View" graphics would perform and all-around how this Atom SoC would run under Linux. Sadly, the ASUS T100TA appears to be a crap wreck at this point for running Linux...

http://www.phoronix.com/vr.php?view=MTQ5NzE

don't give up

I managed to get ubuntu booting to command line via grub x86 EFI (ia32)

http://forums.anandtech.com/showpost.php?p=35652212&postcount=1500

http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=2500078

[cataphract]

Can't you netboot?