A year and a half on, it’s much easier to get a fully-working Linux install on the Asus Transformer T100TA. Remember when nothing really worked, and we had to jump through hoops just to get battery monitoring, or power off working? And wifi was just a pain? How things have changed…

Much of the work testing and patching new kernels has been done by Brainwreck and the guys over at the Asus T100 Ubuntu Google+ group. I’ve been away moving house (and job, and country), so sorry for not being around.

I recently did a full reinstall, and here are the latest steps I took to get an almost fully-working machine.

This post refers heavily to the original installation post from 2014. for more detail on any of the steps, you might want to take a look there or in the many helpful comments from other users.

Current status (updated 04/01/2016)

1. First steps: Preparing for the Ubuntu Install

As before, prepare a bootable USB stick, but you can use the Ubuntu 15.10 amd64 release — no need for a latest daily build.

Prepare the stick any way you like, but when done, browse to the EFI/Boot directory, and place this bootloader (named bootia32.efi) there. This bootloader was compiled from source using the latest Grub2. If you don’t trust random downloaded files from the Internet (and you shouldn’t), you can find the instructions for building it yourself here.

2. Booting the Live Image

As before, ensure SecureBoot is disabled and boot to the USB stick (see the old post for detailed instructions if you don’t know how). You can jump straight to “Install Ubuntu” once the Grub menu pops up — no need to edit anything any more.

3. The Ubuntu installer

In the installer, the partitioning scheme you choose is up to you — but you will need to preserve the EFI partition, so don’t just partition the entire disk for Ubuntu.

In addition to the EFI partition, I prefer separate /, /home and /boot mount points; but that is up to you. You could squish down the Windows partition and create the additional partition(s), or just delete the Windows partition altogether if you don’t need it. It’s up to you if you want to blow away Windows or not.

The installer might fail when installing the bootloader. That doesn’t matter — even if it didn’t fail, it wouldn’t work.

When the installer completes, reboot, leaving the USB stick in.

4. First boot

Ubuntu won’t boot yet. We’ll need to install the bootloader properly. So we’ll have to manually bootstrap Ubuntu the first time.

Boot back to the Grub welcome screen on the USB stick. Hit ‘c’ to drop to a Grub command line.

You’ll need to provide Grub with the path to your kernel and initrd to boot. These are both in your /boot directory. First, the path to the kernel:


linux (hd2,gpt5)/boot/vmlinuz-3.13-xxxx root=/dev/mmcblk0p5


Here, (hd2, gpt5) refers to the fifth partition on the third disk (Partition numbering begins at 1 and disk numbering begins at 0). This will vary depending on how you installed and your T100 model. On my 32GB model, Grub assigns the USB stick as hd0, the read-only recovery flash chip as hd1, and the main internal flash as hd2. gpt5 is the fifth partition, but it will depend on how you installed (specifically, where /boot is).

Fortunately, grub has good auto-completion features, so you can hit twice as you type, and grub will list possible completions for you — just keep trying until you see the various vmlinuz kernels.

The root=/dev/mmcblk0p5 will also depend on the partition you installed to. It will be your root partition. Unfortunately this can’t be auto-completed, so if you can’t remember your partition setup, you’ll need to try by trial and error. Only the number after the ‘p’ will change — and it will probably be p5, p6 or p7.

To complete the line, press Enter.

Then you need to specify the location of your initrd. This is easy, it’s in the same place as the kernel:
initrd (hd2,gpt5)/boot/initrd-3.13-xxxx

Then Enter.

Then boot with:
boot

With luck after hitting Enter, you’ll boot through to Ubuntu. If it boots but you get dropped to a Busybox prompt, you got everything correct apart from the root location. Don’t be disheartened — keep trying.

5. Enabling wifi

To get further, we’ll need wifi. This is much, much easier than before — the driver is included with stock Ubuntu. We just need to copy across an nvram file from our firmware to the driver firmware, so open a terminal and type (replace XXXXXX with the real name — just press tab to autocomplete):


sudo cp /sys/firmware/efi/efivars/nvram-XXXXXX /lib/firmware/brcm/brcmfmac43241b4-sdio.txt


(Just a year ago we were custom compiling whole kernels just to get those efivars mounted, how times have changed…)

Then reload the brcmfmac driver:


sudo modprobe -r brcmfmac
sudo modprobe brcmfmac


And your wifi should come up.

6. Completing the installation

Time to fix the bootloader. To do this, we can just install grub-efi-ia32:


sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install grub-efi-ia32


We need to add a line to the kernel boot options to prevent disk corruption.
Edit the grub configuration file:

sudo nano /etc/default/grub

Find the line starting GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT and add intel_idle.max_cstate=0 before quiet splash".

Then ctrl-o, ctrl-x to save & exit, and type:
sudo update-grub to update Grub.

Remove the USB stick and reboot, and you should now have a self-sufficient booting system.

7. Sound

I killed my speakers playing with early sound drivers (fortunately I replaced them with speakers that came along when I had to replace a broken touch screen). Things are much better now though.

The driver is already loaded and working in stock ubuntu, we just need to load an Alsa state file:

Grab the file here, and copy it to /var/lib/alsa/asound.state .

Load the state file into alsa with:
sudo alsactl restore.

Sound should start working.

8. Upgrading to a newer kernel

To get backlight, hotkeys, tablet keys, etc working, we’ll need a newer, patched kernel. I haven’t played too much with the latest kernels yet, but there seem to be a few regressions. I found the this, compiled kernel to be the best available.

(The usual warnings apply about trusting stuff other people have compiled).

Download the amd64 linux-image, linux-firmware and linux-headers files, and install them one by one using:

sudo dpkg-i linux-xxxxx


… and reboot when done.

9. Other scripts

I have made (and/or borrowed) some additional support scripts to improve usability.

Download and save all the raw files somewhere (I put mine in ~/scripts). they all need to be in the same place.

Set them all to be executable:

chmod ugo+x ~/scripts/*.sh


base-station.sh enables/disables the Onboard on-screen keyboard when you undock/dock the tablet. Set up the onscreen keyboard first in System Settings → Accessibility (or type “onboard” in the terminal, and set it to automatically run on system start), then the scripts will enable/disable they keyboard for text fields. A nice notification is also displayed when the dock status is changed. Add it to your user’s startup scripts (type ‘Startup Applications’ in the dash) so it runs on login. Don’t add it to /etc/rc.local — it needs to run as the current user).

rotate.sh (via Kirill Belyaev) auto-rotates the screen/touchscreen. Again, add it to Startup Applications (NOT /etc/rc.local).

auto-brightness.sh automatically adjusts the backlight using the ambient light sensor. Ensure the light sensor driver is loaded (sudo modprobe cm3218x) and add the following line to your /etc/rc.local file, before the ‘exit’ line:


/path/to/script/auto-brightness.sh &


Test it by shining a torch on the light sensor.

And that’s it… by this point, you should have a fairly workable installation, provided you avoid using suspend and hibernation, and don’t need to use the webcam.