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I successfully installed openSUSE-12.3 on a Toshiba Satellite Z930 Ultrabook (with KDE-4.10 desktop). I have this running now for over 1-month, and I have to say I am very pleased thus far with both the Ultrabook and with openSUSE-12.3 running on it.
More can be read on this Ultrabook running under GNU/Linux in this Linlap Toshiba Z930 thread for the Portege which is almost identical to my Toshiba:
Specification:
The specification of this Ultrabook is as follows:
[ul]
[li] CPU Intel Core i7-3667U [/li][li] Graphics : Intel HD Graphics 4000 [/li][li] Display resolution: 13.3” 1366×768 Widescreen [/li][li] RAM : 6 GB [/li][li] wireless: Intel Centrino Advanced-N 6235 (a/g/n) [/li][li] Mass storage: 256 GB SSD-drive [/li][li] Interfaces:[/li][LIST]
[li] 2 x USB-2.0 and 1 x USB-3.0 [/li][li] Ethernet : 10/100/1000 Ethernet port [/li][li] VGA adapter slot [/li][li] HDMI slot [/li][li] SD Card reader [/li][li] Mic/Line in [/li][li] Headphone out [/li][/ul]
[li] Webcam [/li][li] Touchpad [/li][li]Audio hardware codec – Realtek ALC269VC [/li][/LIST]
With the exception of the HDMI output, which I have not tested, the above all works well under openSUSE-12.3.
There is no fingerprint reader on this Toshiba Satellite. Rather the more expensive Toshiba Portege Z930 has the fingerprint reader.
This Ultrabook came with Windows-8 pre-installed in a secure boot and has UEFI firmware and GPT drive partitioning.
Initial Partitioning prior to openSUSE install
I note the following was the default partitioning on this Toshiba (with windows8) :
Number Start (sector) End (sector) Size Code Name
1 2048 923647 450.0 MiB 2700 Basic data partition
2 923648 1456127 260.0 MiB EF00 Basic data partition
3 1456128 1718271 128.0 MiB 0C01 Basic data partition
4 1718272 468746239 222.7 GiB 0700 Basic data partition
5 468746240 487534591 9.0 GiB 2700 Basic data partition
6 487534592 500117503 6.0 GiB FFFF Basic data partition
[ul]
[li]Partition-1 (450.0 MiB) was labelled by the Windows8 partition tool as ‘recovery’ partitions. For example, partition-1 has directories such as BIN, boot, Recovery, RicaTools, System Volume Information [/li][li]Partition-2 (260.0 MiB) is the FAT formatted EFI partition. [/li][li]Partition-3 (128MB) use is not clear to me, as it has only a System Volume Information directory inside it, but I assume it is associated with some sort of recovery. [/li][li]Partition-4 (222.7 GiB) is the main Windows8 partition, and it is the Partition that I wanted to shrink to make room for openSUSE-12.3. [/li][li]Partition-5 (9.0 GiB) was labelled by the Windows8 partition tool as ‘recovery’ partitions. I note it has inside a Recovery directory and a System Volume Information directory. [/li][li]Partition-6 (6.0 GiB) is not mountable (I obtain an unknown file system error when I try to mount it). I don’t know what partition-6 (6.0 GiB) was for. [/li][/ul]
Installing openSUSE-12.3
After noting the above (which I obtained from booting the Toshiba Ultrabook from a liveUSB stick with openSUSE-12.3) I installed openSUSE-12.3 in a dual secure boot with Windows8. On this Ultrabook, I noted F2 key will bring one to the BIOS, and F12 key will bring one the UEFI boot menu.
I adopted the following measures as part of this installation preparation and execution:
[ul]
[li]shrank windows8 partitioning by following the shrinking Windows8 guide here with this reported by me in post #74 in this openSUSE thread ) . [/li].
After shrinking Windows8, I ended up with the following:
Number Start (sector) End (sector) Size Code Name
1 2048 923647 450.0 MiB 2700 Basic data partition
2 923648 1456127 260.0 MiB EF00 Basic data partition
3 1456128 1718271 128.0 MiB 0C01 Basic data partition
4 1718272 134838271 63.5 GiB 0700 Basic data partition
5 134838272 468744191 159.2 GiB 0700 Basic data partition
6 468746240 487534591 9.0 GiB 2700 Basic data partition
7 487534592 500117503 6.0 GiB FFFF Basic data partition
where partition 5 (159.2 GiB) is the empty partition where I planned to place the openSUSE-12.3 partitions.
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[li] After the above shrinking I used a PartedMagic 2013-6-15 liveCD to create an empty swap, / and /home parttion, with this is the partitioning after these two activies:[/li]
Number Start (sector) End (sector) Size Code Name
1 2048 923647 450.0 MiB 2700 Basic data partition
2 923648 1456127 260.0 MiB EF00 Basic data partition
3 1456128 1718271 128.0 MiB 0C01 Basic data partition
4 1718272 134838271 63.5 GiB 0700 Basic data partition
5 134838272 147945471 6.2 GiB 8200
6 468746240 487534591 9.0 GiB 2700 Basic data partition
7 487534592 500117503 6.0 GiB FFFF Basic data partition
8 147945472 200374271 25.0 GiB 0700
9 200374272 468746239 128.0 GiB 0700
where partitions 5 (6.2 GiB for swap), 8 (25.0 GiB for / (root)) and 9 (128.0 GiB for /home) above are the empty (newly created) partitions populated by me for openSUSE.
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[li]installed openSUSE-12.3 from a USB-3.0 memory stick plugged in to the Ultrabook’s USB-3.0 port. The copying part of the software installation took only about 4.5 minutes which is very fast. To be able to boot to the USB-3.0 memory stick I had to press F12 on the Ultrabook to obtain the USB memory stick boot options. I created the USB-3.0 bootable memory stick using an openSUSE-12.3 install on a different PC with the program ImageWriter (available from support repositories for openSUSE-12.3) following guidance given on an openSUSE wiki. [/li][li]when installing openSUSE-12.3 I was careful to chose the appropriate partitions for the swap, / (root) and /home partitions. I chose to select the already existing EFI partition for openSUSE, being careful to NOT reformat the data on the existing EFI partition. I enabled secure boot in the openSUSE installation gui. [/li][li]when installing openSUSE-12.3 I was careful to choose the grub-efi selection for the boot manager [/li][li]toward the later part of the installation, during the first reboot, the Ultrabook refused to boot to openSUSE-12.3, but instead booted to Windows8. The problem is documented in this openSUSE forum thread starting at post #78 … where in the end, following some excellent help from the openSUSE forums, the solution suggested to me, which I adopted was to copy the /EFI/opensuse directory contents into the /EFI/Boot efi and rename the opensuse shim.efi to bootx64.efi, replacing the previous.efi. I note via an md5sum checksum comparison that the older bootx64.efi was identical to the /EFI/Microsoft/Boot/bootmgfw.efi file. But now after my copying, the new bootx64.efi is identical to the openSUSE shim.efi file. [/li][/ul]
While trying to sort the above noted reboot problem, I did update the BIOS from v.6.40 to v.6.70 where the BIOS update did not help in solving the reboot problem.
SSD drive & SD-Card
This Ultrabook as a 256 GB SSD-drive which is VERY fast. I was concerned wrt the long term health of the SSD drive (wrt GNU/Linux conducting an excesslive number of writes on the SSD drive, possibly reducing drive life). So I followed the guidance here in this openSUSE wiki.
In addition, to avoid the risk of excessive writes to the /var/log files, I purchased a 16GB SD-card, inserted it in the SD Card reader slot, formatted the card as EXT4 with jouranalling OFF, and mounted that card (with fstab entries) as /var. Hence all /var contents are now written to the SD-card and not to the SSD drive. While the SD-card may fail early as a result, I note SD-cards are very inexpensive to replace (and I have a backup SD-card).
I documented my SD card approach in [openSUSE] post#67here in this thread](https://forums.opensuse.org/english/other-forums/community-fun/general-chit-chat/483326-pondering-new-ultrabook-purchase-2.html#post2571606).
The fstab entry I used was for mounting this EXT4 formatted SD-Card:
/dev/disk/by-id/mmc-SU16G_0xb1d81b23-part1 /var ext4 noatime,acl,user_xattr,discard 1 2
where as noted in that quoted post, I may in the future change that fstab entry to:
/dev/mmcblk0p1 /var ext4 noatime,acl,user_xattr,discard 1 2
