Asus X205TA hardware support in Ubuntu

[Kuci]

So here is a machine driver, byt-rt5648. https://onedrive.live.com/redir?resi...thint=file%2cc

Kuci, don't yell at me mate I'm just an electronics technician, not a software engineer.

I'm trying to replicate what Michele Curti did by uding the rt5645 machine driver (as it has the same device ID as the rt5648 apparently). He didn't have the rt5648 codec but we do. Somehow I need these to work together but I don't know what I'm doing.

Anyhow I'm going back to my workbench to sniff solder.

EDIT: https://onedrive.live.com/redir?resi...thint=file%2cc

I had afew too many beerstnight, sorry about the above link, it was a bum steer. The edit link is the correct one

EDIT 2. Just had to fix up a few thing so if you downloaded it before my edit download it again. 1108Z

EDIT 3. I never added a ACPI device id. I think without it it wont detect the card.

Hi, mcinnesconti. I'm not really sure why you duplicate my work, but I'm not gonna yell at you for sure.

Actually. I totally forgot about rt5645. Yes, I reported it matches device ID with our card, but what I didn't wrote is that is matches the ID in the codec. So, the whole rt5648 codec thing might be unnecessary and our card might be running find with rt5645 and minor tweaks...

I've been playing around with the thing for past few days and it seems like we're still far away from the success. I haven't been able to do much with both BYT and BYT CR drivers. The problem is the device probably doesn't use standard naming for DAIs, so we need to find out which DAIs are being exposed by the CPU. This is a deal breaker and we probably won't move any further without knowing more about the DAI(s). mcinnesconti, you wrote you're an electronics technician, do you know something about our options here ?

[mcinnesconti]

Hi, mcinnesconti. I'm not really sure why you duplicate my work, but I'm not gonna yell at you for sure.

Actually. I totally forgot about rt5645. Yes, I reported it matches device ID with our card, but what I didn't wrote is that is matches the ID in the codec. So, the whole rt5648 codec thing might be unnecessary and our card might be running find with rt5645 and minor tweaks...

I've been playing around with the thing for past few days and it seems like we're still far away from the success. I haven't been able to do much with both BYT and BYT CR drivers. The problem is the device probably doesn't use standard naming for DAIs, so we need to find out which DAIs are being exposed by the CPU. This is a deal breaker and we probably won't move any further without knowing more about the DAI(s). mcinnesconti, you wrote you're an electronics technician, do you know something about our options here ?

Duplicate? Yes of course, but only because I'm trying to learn how this thing works. I'm just going through the steps here: http://mailman.alsa-project.org/pipe...ay/092462.html

Electronics Technician. Yes but only experience in military hardware, like long range air search radar, combat systems, digital to analog converters, weapons systems and IFF. (12 years and counting)

Our options? Use the operating system that the machine was designed to use. However this is the wrong answer in this instance as we all love Linux and want to see this thing work.

Yourself and KemmyLand seem to be the guys in the know when it comes to making this thing work. So if you need us to do anything to make it easier on yourselves then tell us (the community here) what you need and we will do our best to carry it out for you.


Peace mate.

[KemyLand]

Hi, everybody! I've not been here a lot lately because I was returning to my country after New Year's, well, you know, NewYear'sStuff(TM). In the meantime, I've not reported that, but I got the driver/codec/whatever to get it's rt5648_i2c_probe function called by the I2C subsystem. And, even better, some printk()s revealed thatit was being called with the RT5648 chip as argument! That means that the I2C recognition stuff is now working, along with module loading-on-demand. Now, I'm trying to get the kernel to achieve a call to rt5648_probe(), a.k.a the Ultimate Function whose purpose is to finally report the card's existence to the ALSA subsystem. That means that a call to that function will ultimately lead us to a very nice spot. BTW, I think I still have to rebase by crappy history and push -f it .

[aleck2]

Installing elementary OS on the Asus X205TA

OK, here's what I've got so far for installing elementary OS! Working off KemyLand's guide, changing what doesn't work. Much of it I haven't figured out yet; will update as need be. If anyone else is installing an Ubuntu-based distro on this computer, feel free to chime in with what worked for you.

Prepping the USB

• If you're using Windows, use Rufus to create your bootable USB. Make sure you select

• GPT partition table for UEFI
• 64-bit elementary OS ISO
• write to USB in ISO mode, not dd

• If you're working on Linux, try using Gparted to format the USB with:

• GPT partition table
• FAT32 partition
• boot flag

• Then mount the ISO using sudo mkdir /mnt/whatever, sudo mount -o loop /path/to/elementary.iso /mnt/whatever. Browse to it in Files (just type /mnt/whatever in if it doesn't show up in the sidebar) and copy everything on it to the USB.

Now let's add our 32-bit EFI file and install elementary.

• Copy bootia32.efi (I used this one, click "View Raw" to download) into /mnt/whatever/EFI/boot/.
• Turn off the X205TA and plug in the USB.
• Turn on the X205TA. Start button-mashing F2 as soon as the power light comes on and you'll get into the BIOS.
• Press → till you get to the last tab and select the USB from the "Boot Override" list.
• Choose "Try elementary without installing". Open Terminal and enter "ubiquity -b". The installer will run without installing GRUB. When it finishes, don't try to boot into the new installation -- it won't work.

Installing grub for 32-bit EFI

So we never installed GRUB. Let's fix that. Restart the X205TA and once again boot from the USB. The following commands attach the important parts of the X205TA's Linux filesystem to the USB.

sudo mount /dev/yourrootpartition /mnt # Probably /dev/mmcblk0p[some number]. You can use Gparted to figure it out
sudo mount /dev/yourbootpartition /mnt/boot/efi # If this doesn't work, try /mnt/boot instead
sudo mount proc /mnt/proc -t proc
sudo mount sys /mnt/sys -t sysfs
sudo mount -o bind /dev /mnt/dev # the / is important
sudo mount -o bind /run /mnt/run # this enables Internet in chroot
sudo mount pts /dev/pts -t devpts
sudo modprobe efivarfs
sudo chroot /mnt # This "logs you in" to the filesystem we've just set up

For this you'll need Internet access, so tether an Android phone.

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install efibootmgr # may already be installed
sudo apt-get install grub-efi-ia32 grub-efi-ia32-bin # this installs a 32-bit version of EFI instead of 64-bit

Now back to KemyLand's instructions:

mount -t efivarfs efivarfs /sys/firmware/efi/efivars 
grub-install --target=i386-efi --efi-directory=/boot/efi --bootloader-id=grub_uefi --recheck # "efi-directory" ought to be the same as the one you mounted the boot partition to - either /boot or /boot/efi
sudo update-grub

Booting up

If everything has gone well, you'll be able to boot into your new Linux installation. However, things rarely go well on the first try. If you just end up at a GRUB prompt, here's how you can boot:

set root=(hdX,gptY) # use "ls" to figure out what drive to enter here; should be the one you installed Linux on. For example in my case it's (hd0,gpt5)
linux /vmlinuz root=/dev/mmcblk0pY # should be the same number as gpt 
initrd /initrd.img
boot

If you are dual-booting, you will see the GRUB menu. If you have installed GRUB correctly you will notice that it's completely hideous, which goes against the entire freaking purpose of installing elementary to begin with, am I right?! So:

• Here's a guide to customizing GRUB by adding a background image and changing the text colours.
• There are a few premade themes floating around that you can fiddle with, like Vimix, Oxygen, and Axiom.

Compiling a new kernel

elementary OS 0.3.2 comes with kernel version 3.19. However, later versions have better hardware support. We are going to compile a newer version of the Linux kernel from its source code, which you can download at kernel.org. I can report that using harryharryharry's config (linked in KemyLand's guide) and kernel version 4.5.0-rc4 works.

Important! In order to compile the kernel you will need to install some extra things:

• gcc/g++ 4.9, exactly as described here: http://askubuntu.com/a/581497
• openssl and libssl-dev (available in official repo)

From here on out, following KemyLand's guide will work.

One snag I've noticed: elementary OS 0.3.2 uses a different touchpad driver by default, so two-finger scrolling and two-finger left-click doesn't work out of the box. I am working on figuring out a solution.

_____________

This is as far as I've gotten. Will add more as I continue.

[harryharryharry]

Hi, everybody! I've not been here a lot lately because I was returning to my country after New Year's, well, you know, NewYear'sStuff(TM). In the meantime, I've not reported that, but I got the driver/codec/whatever to get it's rt5648_i2c_probe function called by the I2C subsystem. And, even better, some printk()s revealed thatit was being called with the RT5648 chip as argument! That means that the I2C recognition stuff is now working, along with module loading-on-demand. Now, I'm trying to get the kernel to achieve a call to rt5648_probe(), a.k.a the Ultimate Function whose purpose is to finally report the card's existence to the ALSA subsystem. That means that a call to that function will ultimately lead us to a very nice spot. BTW, I think I still have to rebase by crappy history and push -f it .

I'm kind of hesitant to show too much optimism since some people think this is only the tip of the iceberg, but this sounds like solid progress !

[Kuci]

OMG, linux 4.4 looks so "good". MMC driver bugs, no wifi...

[harryharryharry]

@kuci as opposed to ...

[Pashapanther]

I use kernel 4.3 and I'm happy with that. is there any problem with 4.4? everything works fine with it? touchpad? wifi?

[harryharryharry]

when using 4.4 there is a regression in the MMC-layer and you need to revert commit 9faac7b95ea4f9e83b7a914084cc81ef1632fd91

(source: erik-h-andersson
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.p...7#post13399807 )

[Kuci]

harryharryharry, Pashapanther: Yup, I find linux 4.3 pretty stable on this device. Except I can't move cursor on Gnome with Xorg, but Gnome on Wayland works surprisingly well for me.