The ASUS "Bay Trail" T100 Is Not Linux Friendly

[paperwastage]

my first post contained urls, and has been sent to the mod queue awaiting approval

anyways, I managed to get ubuntu to boot up.

you need a 32-bit EFI GRUB at <usb drive>/efi/boot/bootia32.efi

here is the manual URL

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

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

EDIT: first posts containing URL are placed into pending, but first posts without URL are allowed, and can be edited to contain URL... yay

IMAGE:

[DanL]

Fire up a puppy

Puppy uses some ancient components, and we're talking about 2GB of RAM here, not 256MB...

[Apopas]

Fucking UEFI
As if we hadn't already enough to worry when buying a Linux laptop!

[Apopas]

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

Do you sell RAMs or something? Otherwise I fail to see the validity of such a post...

[birdie]

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.

Linux on a touch device? Tell me more - it's not about RAM, it's about usability.

2GB of RAM is just too little for Windows, besides I hate Metro and there are far fewer apps for Windows.

[birdie]

Do you sell RAMs or something? Otherwise I fail to see the validity of such a post...

I feed on it. My PC has 16GB of RAM and I'd be happy to have even more. Jokes aside, a desktop OS with less than 4GB of RAM is just not an option. Android runs just fine on 2GB of RAM though.

[Apopas]

Depends on what you do with it. Always! My Chakra-KDE runs fine on my 2GB RAM laptop which I use for surfing, watching movies and casual gaming.

[GreatEmerald]

Linux on a touch device? Tell me more - it's not about RAM, it's about usability.

I have a tablet, an Oak Trail. If not for its stupid proprietary screen implementation that prevents it from turning off, Linux would be much, much more usable than Windows. Xournal, for one, is much better than Windows Journal. And Linux in general works much faster than Windows on it.

[AJSB]

F++k Intel for their crappy SoCs (AMD rules in that department)

F++k ASUS for their crappy hardware (and yeah that includes their MoBos).

...and f++k the usual suspect, micro$haft for the most s++tloaded O$.

Building our own machines is the only way to go...or buy machines with pre-installed Linux (yeah, i know...)

[Luke]

Try removing hard drive and installing to it on another machine

If you have other machines, this machine is said to come with a normal (removable) hard drive. If you wipe Windows from it on another machine, it can no longer boot Windows. If only a Linux distro is installed on disk it has to boot that or nothing.

I would assume just removiing the disk and powering on this would force a UEFI setup to bring up the UEFI options, certainly it is what I would try first if I could not stop the machine from attempting to boot Windows, which I would never activate nor permit to connect to a network. I would not consider buying anything that combines Windows 8 with a soldered-down disk, as it would have to be returned or discarded if I could not get it to boot anything else.

Some have managed to install on this machine without removing the disk by a method described in the link below, you need to use a 32 bit bootloader image for some reason:

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

"
Ubuntu:


You need an EFI-compatible distro. For ubuntu, x64 EFI is enabled since 12.04-2. However, we'll need to include x86 EFI because our bootloader only reads x86 EFIs

13.04 x64 desktop- (Status: x-server crashes and dumps you to interactive shell)
Used Rufus(GPT for UEFI + FAT + 64 kb+ raring x64 as bootable disk using ISO Image) to create bootable USB. Copied over

OK, the Xserver crashes with the Ubuntu raring based distro (predating this hardware) they used. That bug might be fixed by now, if not it should be fixable by the xorg team-or you could try a Wayland or Mir distro to bypass X entirely. Wonder if it is a lack of xvesa support in the video firmware, combined with a video driver issue?