Asus X205TA hardware support in Ubuntu

[podenno]

Hi all,

Quick update, seems that the file: /lib/firmware/brcm/brcmfmac43340-sdio.txt (copied over from /sys/firmware/efi/efivars/nvram*), contained an incorrect MAC address. I've updated in brcmfmac43340-sdio.txt the correct MAC (given by wpa_supplicant) and now I got my X205TA finally online with Linux

Koen.

By "an incorrect MAC address" I assume that you mean that the MAC specific to your wireless hardware (found, for example, with iwconfig) needed to be provided in the file. (I ask this because mine doesn't work, with the provided MAC or mine. Maybe that is because I installed the OS with a USB wireless and the ASUS one is now eth0. But I'm just guessing.)

[d-radzik]

hi, I would like to buy this laptop to use with ubuntu. Light weight is what I'm looking for. Is this better than chromebook? Do you think that the remaining issues will be solved to make it fully ubuntu friendly?
Thanks

[schmidtbag]

Jon Bradbury - you should edit your first post with a step-by-step guide with proven results for this. It seems this laptop is gaining popularity pretty quickly, and it seems like results are very specific. Here, I can start you out:
1. Download your chosen variant of Ubuntu 15.04. In my experience, using debian, even with the 4.0 kernel, has had some regressions.
2. If using unetbooting to make a bootable flash drive and you want a 64 bit setup, check the "EFI/BOOT/" folder for a 32-bit EFI (bootia32.efi) and get one if it is missing.
3. When booting the ISO, run "sudo rm /dev/mmcblk0rpmb"
4. If you don't intend to dual boot, use gparted and delete all partitions. For some reason, the Ubuntu installer seems really picky about how the EFI partition is set up, so don't use it just yet
5. When running the installer, let it choose how to partition the drive. Though the EFI partition is a bit excessive (512MB), it creates a 2GB swap space, which is reasonable.
6. Before rebooting, if you are using the 64-bit release, chroot into your Ubuntu install and run "apt-get remove grub-efi-amd64" and "apt-get install grub-efi-ia32"
7. Reboot
8. Download the linux 4.0 RC3 (or newer) kernel and install it. In my experience, RC1 seemed to make the trackpad "choppy".
9a. Download http://www.filedropper.com/x205ta
9b. Copy blacklist.conf to /etc/modprobe.d/
9c. Copy rclocal.txt to /etc/
9d. Copy the brcmfmac43340* files to /lib/firmware/brcm/
9e. In my experience, you don't need to worry about the MAC address in the .txt file. It worked for me without having to change that.
10a. Add "options sdhci debug_quirks=0x8000" to /etc/modprobe.d/sdhci.conf
10b. And then run "update-initramfs -u -k all"


So anyway, did anybody get Bluetooth to work? Since lspci doesn't tell me anything useful at all, I can't figure out what it is called. If I can at least get bluetooth to work, I can try getting some bluetooth headphones and wait for the built-in audio to get implemented.

Since this laptop boots so quickly and is so low-power, I personally find suspend to be a very low priority. Besides, linux is notorious for poor suspend support, so I'm personally not going to bother focusing on that.

[Pieni_Sieni]

Thanks very much for all the useful information on this thread.

I have been attempting a 64bit install of the Desktop version of Ubuntu 15.04 beta2.

The install goes fine until it starts installing GRUB.

Installation GUI pops up with an error message saying: "Unable to install GRUB in /dev/mmcblk0".

A closer look at the syslog states:

ubuntu grub-installer: info: Installing grub on '/dev/mmcblk0'
ubuntu grub-installer: info: grub-install does not support --no-floppy
ubuntu grub-installer: info: Running chroot /target grub-install --force
ubuntu grub-installer: grub-install: error: /usr/lib/grub/i386-pc/modinfo.sh doesn't exist. Please specify --target or --directory.
ubuntu grub-installer: error: Running 'grub-install --force failed.

So far, I used Rufus to prepare a bootable USB stick from "ubuntu-15.04-beta2-desktop-amd64.iso" with a GPT Partition scheme for UEFI. Then copied bootia32.efi to the /EFI/BOOT directory. Also I turned of secure boot control, and set the USB controller select setting to EHCI in the BIOS.

Plus tried first cleaning the partition tables with gparted before install. Any ideas would be very much welcome, thanks.

PS. Did "sudo rm /dev/mmcblk0rpmb" too!

[andrea61]

boot using plugged usb drive and press "c" to boot manually

## boot without grub
linux (hd1,gpt2)/boot/vmlinuz[use tab to complete the name] root=/dev/mmcblk0p2 reboot=pci,force init=/bin/systemd ro quiet
initrd (hd1,gpt2)/boot/vmlinuz[use tab to complete the name]
boot


## install grub
apt-get install git bison libopts25 libselinux1-dev autogen m4 autoconf help2man libopts25-dev flex libfont-freetype-perl automake autotools-dev libfreetype6-dev texinfo
mkdir git
cd git
git clone git://git.savannah.gnu.org/grub.git
cd grub
./autogen.sh
./configure --with-platform=efi --target=i386 --program-prefix=""
make
cd grub-core
sudo ../grub-install -d . --efi-directory /boot/efi/ --target=i386
sudo nautilus --> copy /boot/efi/EFI/grub/grubia32.efi to /boot/efi/EFI/ubuntu/
sudo update-grub2




*** with kernel from daily builds 2015 04 10 --> webcam is working fine (but can't test sound)

[TheNighthawk]

Hi all,

Question, we're experiencing regular freezes of Lubuntu (kernel 4.0 final), does somebody else have this too? It's reproducable when closing the laptop cover (system goes in standby?) and reopening it. I tried to configure that the laptop shouldn't do anything when closing the laptop but this doesn't seem to help. Next to that also while working (surfing, LibreOffice), sometimes (not often) the system freezes and a reboot is necessary ... Somebody has this too and knows a work-around?

Thanks,
br, Koen.

[raviarya]

I do face the same problems but don't know the workaround.

Hi all,

Question, we're experiencing regular freezes of Lubuntu (kernel 4.0 final), does somebody else have this too? It's reproducable when closing the laptop cover (system goes in standby?) and reopening it. I tried to configure that the laptop shouldn't do anything when closing the laptop but this doesn't seem to help. Next to that also while working (surfing, LibreOffice), sometimes (not often) the system freezes and a reboot is necessary ... Somebody has this too and knows a work-around?

Thanks,
br, Koen.

[andrea61]

Hi all,

Question, we're experiencing regular freezes of Lubuntu (kernel 4.0 final), does somebody else have this too? It's reproducable when closing the laptop cover (system goes in standby?) and reopening it. I tried to configure that the laptop shouldn't do anything when closing the laptop but this doesn't seem to help. Next to that also while working (surfing, LibreOffice), sometimes (not often) the system freezes and a reboot is necessary ... Somebody has this too and knows a work-around?

Thanks,
br, Koen.

I have the same issue but it's really rare.
Sometimes the 4.0 kernel freezes during boot.

Are there any news about sound driver and codec?

[AtticHacker]

Just want to share my experience, as I just bought one of these little beasties.

I managed to do a minimal netinstall of Debian 8 (jessie) - I happened to have a wifi dongle, so once install was complete I was able to install all the necessary extra packages to have a fully fledged machine running gnome.

I upgraded the kernel to 4.0.0-040000rc6-generic and managed to get battery stats, and wifis working.

While audio still doesn't work, I use a USB headset which works flawlessly with no configuration.

This thread has been wildly helpful!

Hi, I also used the Debian 8 netinstall, compiled the 4.0 kernel from source and got wifi working. However I still can't see my battery through acpi / upower. Did you do anything specific to get the battery working?

Edit: I tried the ubuntu provided kernel image and now it seems to work! I guess I didn't enable specific modules during my build.
Edit2: Also having the freezing issue now with this kernel. Didn't have these issues with my custom kernel build.

[AtticHacker]

I believe I fixed the freezing when closing the laptop, I simply added the following line in /etc/systemd/logind.conf

HandleLidSwitch=ignore

(Afterwards you need to restart logind or reboot)

I assume that the laptop tries to go to sleep and isn't able to wake up again, now it just simply does nothing when the lid is closed.
I was able to reproduce the freezing after 2 minutes of the lid being closed, but since I made this chance I've been unable to reproduce it (2, 5, 10 minutes).
Thankfully the screen has a hardware switch so it turns off when the lid is closed.