I have just successfully installed OpenSuse 12.3 on my Asus Zenbook Prime UX32VD along with Windows 8 and I have decided to make a post about it because:
[ol]
[li]Most people use Ubuntu on this laptop. There is very little information about OpenSuse support on this one. [/li][li]Most people have this laptop with different disk configuration: 32GB SSD + 500GB HDD instead of two 256GB SSD in RAID 0 which is a quite exotic configuration. [/li][li]Dualboot with Windows 8 using UEFI is still a quite new thing (at least for me it was). [/li][/ol]
I will spoil the surprise and tell you that OpenSuse works very well with no extra tweaks (compared to other distros). If you want to install OpenSuse the way I did, consider following these steps:
[ol]
[li]Go to the BIOS (ehm UEFI) and disable Secure Boot. This step is not exactly required as there is an experimental support for Secure Boot in Open Suse but I decided to take the easy way. You enter BIOS using Delete key but it’s not an easy task since this laptop boots really really fast. There is like 0.5-1 second window to enter the BIOS after you hit the power on button. [/li][li]Boot into Windows and use Disk Manager to shrink Windows partitions. You can find the tool in Control Panel. There are actually many partitions but only the two biggest ones are visible to the user, C: and D:. I completely removed D: partition and shrank the C: partition to around 100GB. This made approximately 320GB large space for OpenSuse. You can probably use a Linux partitioning tool instead but this was the simplest and probably most reliable way to do it (shrinking NTFS with a tool made directly by Microsoft). [/li][li]Boot from OpenSuse installation media. There is no DVD drive so you have to use USB stick. I created one using SUSE Studio ImageWriter from standard OpenSuse 12.3 installation iso. You can enter the boot menu using the ESC key. The situation is the same like when entering bios, you have to be very quick. Make sure you use the “EFI boot” option when booting from the USB stick (in my case, there wasn’t any other option). [/li][li]Go through the installation as usual and when you reach the part when you configure the disk, go to the expert mode. Right before that, a small dialog window should appear telling you that Intel RAID controller was found and if you want to use it (or something like that). Say yes. [/li][li]Setup your partitions.[/li][LIST=1]
[li]The installer will suggest you a default configuration with swap, /home and /root partition. If you want to go my way, remove all of them and keep only the partitions used by Windows (there are like 5 of them). [/li][li]Create your own EFI partition. EFI partition is the partition your system boots from. There is one for Windows 8 and the default way is to use this EFI partition for OpenSuse as well meaning that OpenSuse will share it with Windows. I’ve read this is not the best solution because Windows doesn’t play nice on the common playground. So create a new empty partition (mine has around 300 MB) and set the filesystem as FAT. Make sure that the new EFI partition is mounted to /boot/efi instead of the original one. [/li][li]Create the swap partition. Mine has 10GB. This laptop has memory upgradable up to 10GB and afaik the swap partition should be at least as big as memory (in order to get hibernate properly working). [/li][li]Create the root partition. Mine has 20GB with Ext4 as OpenSuse orignally suggested. [/li][li]Create the home prtition. You can use all the space left but I’ve read that it’s generally a good idea to keep around 10% of the disk capacity unallocated. It will extend the SSD’s life span. So my home partition has 260GB and I left 50GB free (I can use this place anytime later). [/li][li]Make sure that both root and home partitions are set up to use proper mount points (in my case the installer did it for me). Altogether you will have 9 partitions spread across the whole 500GB RAID 0 array. [/li][li]I have read somewhere that OpenSuse installer is not able to work with RAID 0 array managed by Windows and therefore it is necessary to create the RAID array using OpenSuse, then reinstall Windows and then install OpenSuse. This is not the case. The installer reads the RAID array flawlessly. It is possible that the RAID is managed completely on the hardware level but I’m not an expert on this, I don’t know. [/li][/ol]
[li]Finish the setup. I wasn’t able to use wifi during the installation and install updates, but it doesn’t matter, you can do it later. Besides that, there isn’t anything special that would surprise you. [/li][/LIST]
After that, your laptop should be able to boot OpenSuse without any problems. If you want to boot to Windows, simply enter the boot menu using ESC and select which EFI partition you want to boot from. That means that the dualboot is completely managed on the UEFI (BIOS) level. So you will never experience those situations when you couldn’t boot to your OpenSuse because Windows had overwritten MBR or when you couln’t boot to Windows because there was a wrong boot entry in the grub menu. You can setup the boot order directly in the BIOS. The GRUB is still present to boot OpenSuse but you don’t need to actualy use it. Therefore I set the grub time limit to minimum.
Possible problems
[ul]
[li]If OpenSuse boots very slowly, see this bug which might be the probable reason (wrongly configured swap partition). [/li][li]In my case, hibernate doesn’t work (even when the problem described above is fixed). I will look more into it but at this point, it’s not a problem because thanks to SSD the system starts really really fast. Suspend to RAM works flawlessly. [/li][li]Sometimes after restart OpenSuse hangs on message “Loading initial ramdisk”. I don’t know why but all I have to do is to turn off and on the laptop. So not a big deal. [/li][/ul]
About other things I would recommend you this page. It’s written for Ubuntu but most of the things are the same for OpenSuse. What works in Ubuntu, works in OpenSuse and vice versa. One exception is hibernation which should generally work but I belive it has something do to with RAID 0 involved.
[b]About SSD alignment
[/b]This is my first laptop with SSDs. I read something about it so I knew that the partitions should be “aligned” with the SSD disk in order to get the best performance. I was quite nervous about it during the installation because there was no clear way how to do it. So I decided to let Yast do his job and I simply set up the partitions the way I wanted. Right after the installation I checked the partitions and first sector of each partition is a multiple of 512. So it seems to me that Yast did all the work for me and the partitions are aligned (please correct me if I’m wrong). Yet still I’m not entiraly sure about how does it work… because in this particular case there is no physical 500GB SSD disk, there is one “virtual” which covers two 256G SSD disk.[b]
What is it good for
[/b]Why is it a good idea to have two SSDs in RAID 0?
tobik@zenbook:~> dd if=/dev/zero of=output bs=8k count=2024k
16 978 542 592 bytes (17 GB) copied, 18,4724 s, 919 MB/s
Yes, I just wrote 17GB in 18.5 seconds lol! This is even faster than what other guys with similar configuration measured around the Internet. So IMHO if the partitions were badly aligned it wouldn’t perform so well.