ASUS S56CM & Ubuntu

**snowz** · November 25th, 2012

Does Ubuntu work out of the box on the ASUS S56CM Ultrabook?

**Amithiel** · November 26th, 2012

in a day or 2, im going to buy it too. i wonder if it works fine
24gb ssd, and another 1tb hd

**snowz** · November 26th, 2012

The thing that is bothering me is the optical drive. Would be better having the optical drive replaced with a better battery or something more useful.

**Amithiel** · November 26th, 2012

Originally Posted by snowz

The thing that is bothering me is the optical drive. Would be better having the optical drive replaced with a better battery or something more useful.

true. anyway, cant wait to get mine

**Amithiel** · November 26th, 2012

jesus, just got home with the laptop. can't even format this thing. what the hell. boots only from secure boot, wont let me do anything else. not even installing windows7 ?

**Amithiel** · December 10th, 2012

did you managed to install ubuntu?
since our disk is 1 TB + 24 GB SSD, how should we do the partitioning?
is it possible to disable the secureboot?

**sampo555** · March 29th, 2013

I've managed to get the battery life from 2.5 hours to 4.5 hours by completely disabling the NVidia GPU (it's just idling there drawing power if you don't use Bumblebee to run something on it). See https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Bumblebee for installation instructions (notice the "For advanced users..." part if you only want to save power) and https://github.com/Bumblebee-Project/bbswitch#usage for usage.

**yalçın can** · May 2nd, 2013

Originally Posted by sampo555

I've managed to get the battery life from 2.5 hours to 4.5 hours by completely disabling the NVidia GPU (it's just idling there drawing power if you don't use Bumblebee to run something on it). See https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Bumblebee for installation instructions (notice the "For advanced users..." part if you only want to save power) and https://github.com/Bumblebee-Project/bbswitch#usage for usage.

Bios updating solved my problem but I had to install windows to install it. Whatever problem solved. Thanks for everything sampo555

**Roasted** · April 22nd, 2013

How did you guys manage to get Ubuntu installed on it? I successfully installed 13.04 but each time I try to boot up it just goes right to the BIOS. I disabled CSM, Fast Boot, and Secure Boot, but I'm getting nowhere. I updated the BIOS and that made no change. I contacted ASUS and they don't seem to care (their service can be roughly translated as "pure garbage", and I base that on a dozen situations in the past two years, not just this one).

Does anybody have any insight?

**Roasted** · April 23rd, 2013

Somebody suggested to me 3 things:

1) Disable Secure Boot
2) Disable Launch CSM
3) Format drives with MBR partition table

I had done 1 and 2, but not 3. Turns out that's what was needed. I'm super happy to be running Ubuntu on this laptop without any issues now. My function keys seem to work and resume/suspend works without issue. That being said, I can't help but to wonder - what if I needed GPT? What if I had a 5TB 2.5" HDD I wanted to install? With the limitations of MBR, I wouldn't be able to take advantage of the size of that drive, which seems to ultimately come back to Microsoft being to blame (I would think) seeing as though since using MBR is what I needed to do in order to circumvent Secure Boot so I could install the operating system I wanted.

So, would I be absolutely stuck? Is there no hope for GPT partition tables with Secure Boot disabled? (which thereby enables some sort of Legacy Boot, I assume, thereby requiring MBR?) Or am I totally off with my understanding?