The ASUS "Bay Trail" T100 Is Not Linux Friendly

[shivansps]

Bay Trail is a excellent product, and it has nothing to do with blocking stuff or Microsoft, its just a bios that is only UEFI with lack of MBR bootloader support(something that will be very common from now on, MBR is deprecated stuff) and only support to 32bits UEFI because it ships with 32bits OS and only 2GB, its just Asus playing lazy with the bios, thats all, there is nothing blocking anything. I wish i could say the same about Chromebooks.

We have to wait to see if Android BT devices also allows for USB booting.

[Krysto]

Not a huge loss. Bay Trail sucks and is barely competitive with last year's ARM chips anyway. Now that Intel has given up on supporting Mir, too, and given that Mir is supposed to work with Android drivers and is more optimized for ARM chips, it's better off for Canonical to bet their future on ARM chips anyway (perhaps on Nvidia's Denver/Maxwell chips).

What does suck, though, is Microsoft's very transparent evil way of trying to block Linux from installing on new "Windows machines", even though they say you only have to switch something off to make it work or whatever, but they try to make it as painful as possible to do it.

[Lion]

I wonder, in what state will the notebook endup if you'll claim Windows license refund from ASUS.

[Michael]

Then I supose you can use the EASY Manjaro or any of the Manjaro respins

Manjaro doesn't ship 32-bit UEFI support.

[mitcoes]

This is really bad advice. Just run a 32bit OS with a 32bit bootloader; it might work to run a 64 bit OS on a 32bit UEFI, but you'll get all sorts of unexpected behavior because you're not supposed to be able to mix and match according to the UEFI spec.

Also, AFAIK Arch and Gentoo are the only two distros with support 32bit UEFI, and both require someone with linux experience to get them working.

Then I supose you can use the EASY Manjaro or any of the Manjaro respins

[mjg59]

I can hear ?$ secure boot advocates laughing their arses off now.

This has precisely nothing to do with secure boot. Michael tried booting a 64-bit Linux distribution on a system with 32-bit firmware. He'd have exactly the same failure if he tried to boot 64-bit Windows 8.

[moilami]

I can hear ?$ secure boot advocates laughing their arses off now.

[stiiixy]

It's a bad idea anyway to use a 64-bit SO with just 2G of RAM. It would be better with X32, but that's not generally available yet AFAIK

I was thinking the same thing. 32-bit still has the (ever-shrinking) upper hand with support currently. Yet it does still consume slightly more resources than 32-bit. And on 2GB RAM, you might as well do the 32-bit thing!

Asus must be using recycled code and 'forgot' that Bay Trail is 64-bit. I reckon that's what's happened =D

[mcloud]

It's a bad idea anyway to use a 64-bit SO with just 2G of RAM. It would be better with X32, but that's not generally available yet AFAIK

[mjg59]

It has a 32-bit UEFI implementation, and so you'll need a 32-bit UEFI install image. Most distributions don't provide one, because http://mjg59.dreamwidth.org/26734.html