ASUS S56CM & Ubuntu

**Nesaskewatch** · January 26th, 2013

I too am having problems. I have done as you described; disabled fast boot and secure boot but it will not give me the option to boot from a usb or a dvd. N56VJ-SH71-CD here. Which key you are holding down that gives a list of boot options?

Edit: I found it. One has to enable CSM and disable secure boot and hold the esc key to get the boot options.

**coxtor** · February 13th, 2013

Hey there, I too have managed to successfully install ubuntu, but could somebody please write a step by step tutorial to get bumblebee working?
I have been trying to get it work for a while and it just wont work,
optirun glxspheres fails with :
[ERROR] Cannot access secondary GPU - error : [XORG] (EE) NVIDIA(0): Failed to initialize the NVIDIA kernel module. Please see the

**yalçın can** · February 14th, 2013

I don't know which fan is constantly running background but very annoying fan noise is always bugging me. Does anybody know how to get rid of that?

**sormariano** · February 16th, 2013

Originally Posted by Nesaskewatch

Edit: I found it. One has to enable CSM and disable secure boot and hold the esc key to get the boot options.

Thank you very much !!!.
Ok this solution works fine for me. I was already desperate. I bought it yesterday and I was going to give it back to the dealer

How did you find it? I've read anything about it on the user's guide

**Lurkos** · March 7th, 2013

I've just bought this laptop, and I'm looking forward to install Ubuntu.

However I cannot find the way to modify EFI configuration.
When I press the power button I see the ASUS logo and after few second the Windows 8 welcome screen.
I tried to press ESC, F2, TAB at boot without success.

How did you access the EFI configuration to disable secure boot and enable boot from CD?

Thank you.

**HeraultWan** · March 18th, 2013

Hello guys i bought a S56cm too and i saw this thread so here am i

Concerning the constant fan noise in the background yalçın can spoke about i upgraded the BIOS from ASUS website (http://www.asus.com/Notebooks_Ultrabooks/S56CM/ > Go to support in the upright corner, then to download tab) which fixed it. It's not constantly blowing out cold air anymore

To acces the BIOS Lurko try pressing f8 or f5 aswell on startup i don't remenber quite well which is the one

Some problems i have, maybe you guys know about it :

The battery lasts way longer on Windows than on Ubuntu (Gnome3), 4 hours vs 2h20 (!!) that i brought up to almost 3 hours with powerertop. Did you also experience a drop in battery life under Ubuntu? Do you use powertop as well and what did you do with it or do you have any battery managing tricks?

I have to go through the BIOS and modify the boot order option to change booting from Windows or Ubuntu (which i find weird although being new to Ubuntu), and after selecting Ubuntu i have to go through a kind of second BIOS where i have to select Ubuntu again to boot but where can also select few other things including a "Windows" option which would however not boot correctly. Do you know a bit about EFI/BIOS configuration so that i could have a straightforward Ubuntu/Windows option a the begining?

Thanks,

HW.

**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.

**Roasted** · 3 Weeks Ago

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** · 3 Weeks Ago

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?

**yalçın can** · 2 Weeks Ago

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