openSUSE/Intel Bay Trail/ASUS Transformer Book T100

I recently bought an ASUS Transformer Book T100. I planned to put openSUSE 13.1 i586 with LXDE on it. No luck… the new UEFI (BIOS replacement) didn’t even show my thumb drive when I tried to boot to it. I’ve been reading up on this topic and apparently I will have to run a 64-bit OS with a kernel version of 3.14 or higher. I tried openSUSE Factory x64. This time my thumb drive did show up in the UEFI, but I couldn’t boot to it. When I tried to, the screen went black for a moment, and then I was dumped right back into the same UEFI screen. I had the same results with several other newer 64-bit distros.

The best luck that I have had so far is with “Fedlet,” a Fedora hack for Bay Trail tablets. I can boot to a live version of this distro which includes an install to HDD application. When I run that, I get through the software installation part, but the installer errors out trying to write a boot loader to the drive.
https://www.happyassassin.net/fedlet-a-fedora-remix-for-bay-trail-tablets/

Is SUSE planning on supporting this hardware? If so, does anyone have a time frame as to when this might be? I’ve blasted Windows 8 off of this thing (no regrets - I find it unusable), so I am currently left with running live “Fedlet” as my only option.

If this information has already been posted, then please just tell me where to look.

Thanks in advance!

You do realize that this is a community support forum. Thus we are just users like you. We offer help but can not really comment on planed modifications or change to the OS. I suggest you join a mailinglist

https://en.opensuse.org/openSUSE:Mailing_lists

BTW I have no idea what hardware the ASUS Transformer Book T100 has so can not even comment further on the trouble you seem to have. Maybe it is a video problem. Is this machine a notebook or a notepad? More info may allow help or you need to contact the developers and see or maybe if you can give a complete description in detail of the problem report it on bugzilla. But you will need to give more detail then you did here. Like exactly what hardware you are speaking of, not just some model number.

https://en.opensuse.org/Bugzilla

It’s a “convertible notebook tablet” (the 10.1" screen detaches from the keyboard). When I googled the problem, I found that a lot of people seem to have this model, which is why I suspected that there was already a related thread on this forum and I just hadn’t found it.

It’s got a quad core 1.46 GHz Intel Atom CPU, onboard Intel video with 128 MB memory, 2 GB DDR3L SDRAM, a 64 GB SSD, and the Intel Bay Trail chipset.

I’ve been on this for about 48 hours at this point, and there seems to be a consensus that this is an issue with ASUS having replaced the BIOS with UEFI and having no “legacy mode” available in the menus. I read from someone hacking Arch to make it run on this model that the kernel needs to be version 3.14 or newer, and I’ve read a couple of places that I’ll need a 64-bit distro as 32-bit ones don’t work well with UEFI.

I am in over my head here with current solutions apparently involving mixing and matching kernel modules from different releases. From all that I’ve read, this looks like pretty cheap and generic hardware, so I assume that these problems will go away in time. I was just hoping to catch the attention of someone who might have an idea for how long that might be. I’ll join the mailing list as well.

Well the EFI iteslf does need to be 64 bit I think the OS can still be 32 bit though. In any case if the CPU can run 64 bit why would you want 32??

EFI in itself should be no problem but you do have to boot the install media in EFI mode. If it boot in legacy it want to install in legacy. In the past Asus has not been that friendly to Linux and there are many models that have problems.I suspect it uses some sort of funky video card and touch screen stuff.

I agree the Web does not seem to show any real success using any flavor of Linux on this hardware.

The thing only has 2GB of RAM, so I thought that openSUSE 32-bit with LXDE would be a good choice. That was back when I thought that I was going to have choices. I’ve since failed with openSUSE, Mageia, Fedora, Manjaro, Debian, and Ubuntu.

There is no type of “legacy boot” available.

The only information about the video that I’ve been able to find is “Intel HD Graphics, 128 MB.”

It is part of the UEFI specification, that booting is to be done in native mode. If your system is 64-bit, then bootloaders have to be 64-bit. If secure-boot is enabled, then the kernel also has to be 64-bit.

There is possibly a CSM (compatibility support module) for booting 32-bit systems. However, we have pretty much moved into a 64-bit era.

It’s hard to comment on your other problems. UEFI booting should not require a 3.14 kernel. However, your hardware might require that.

I don’t know anything about fedlet. To install booting on a UEFI system, you will need an EFI partition (normally formatted to FAT). If there is not already such a partition, the installer should have suggested it.

This is where I read that the kernel had to be 3.14 or newer:
https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=179948

I have secure boot disabled. There is no 32-bit support at all from what I can tell. The UEFI menus have very few options. I am fine with running a 64-bit OS. I’m running one everywhere else.

“Fedlet” let me partition the HDD, and I made a 300 MB /boot/efi partition. I also tried taking the default settings, which also make this partition. The “installing software” bar gets to 100%, goes away, I see “installing bootloader” for about 30 seconds or so and then get a long, long error message from anaconda (the installer). I haven’t even been able to get a splash screen from any of the other distros that I’ve tried.

MMMM

See if the BIOS thinks there is a floppy. if so tell it there is not one. there is a bug that has a very long timeout if the BIOS reports a floppy but there is no hardware floppy installed

Bumping my own thread here as I’ve finally had a chance to read more deeply into this. I’ve found a lot of other people with my problem and finally understand the core of my problem. Quoting a poster on another site:

It has a 32-bit UEFI implementation, and so you’ll need a 32-bit UEFI install image. Most distributions don’t provide one, because mjg59 | Don't ship 32-bit UEFI firmware on x86.

I despise Windows 8, so I never even booted into it to realize that it was 32-bit. This thing only supports 32-bit operating systems and has no legacy/BIOS support at all, only UEFI. That’s a really bad combination.

Looks like I will be SOL with openSUSE for a long, long time.
:frowning:

Yes, that’s a problem.

I am not aware of any 32-bit UEFI support for opensuse.

hi everyone,
I found here this guidethat create a bootia32.efi file which is bootable from Asus Transformer book T100ta.
How can we do the same thing in OpenSUSE?

here the code:

$ sudo apt-get install git bison libopts25 libselinux1-dev autogen m4 autoconf help2man libopts25-dev flex libfont-freetype-perl automake autotools-dev libfreetype6-dev texinfo
$ git clone git://git.savannah.gnu.org/grub.git
$ cd grub
$ ./autogen.sh
$ export EFI_ARCH=i386
$ ./configure --with-platform=efi --target=${EFI_ARCH} --program-prefix=""
$ make
$ cd grub-core
$ …/grub-mkimage -d . -o bootia32.efi -O i386-efi -p /boot/grub ntfs hfs appleldr boot cat efi_gop efi_uga elf fat hfsplus iso9660 linux keylayouts memdisk minicmd part_apple ext2 extcmd xfs xnu part_bsd part_gpt search search_fs_file chain btrfs loadbios loadenv lvm minix minix2 reiserfs memrw mmap msdospart scsi loopback normal configfile gzio all_video efi_gop efi_uga gfxterm gettext echo boot chain eval

Hi everyone,
my friend and I succeded in create the bootia32.efi for OpenSUSE 13.2.
It works well and the entire installation process ends without problems but, after the reboot, bios doesn’t find anything to boot.
I think it’s a grub2 problem which isn’t in 32bit mode.

Does anyone have ideas about that?

I suggest you try booting with elilo. Download elilo from the sourceforge site, and set it to load your installed kernel and initrd (with ia32).

As far as I know, the opensuse installer does not have support for installing 32-bit efi booting. So it probably installed traditional MBR/BIOS booting, which won’t work on your system. But elilo should be able to do the trick.

You probably have to install elilo in “\EFI\Boot” in the EFI partition, since you won’t have an NVRAM entry for opensuse.

Hi nrickert,
thanks for the answer.
I tried to do what you say with rEFInd Boot Manager but it didn’t see the OpenSUSE bootloader.

This is the process i follow to install the system:

  1. first starts a grub session (i don’t know why) where i write this commands in order to start the installation

search --no-floppy --file /boot/x86_64/efi --set

prefix=($root)/boot/x86_64/grub2-efi

linux /boot/x86_64/loader/linux splash=silent

initrd /boot/x86_64/loader/initrd

boot

  1. I use this partition scheme:

500 Mib (to be safe) FAT32 EFI - mount point /boot/efi (i have to give the path manually because there isn’t the option /boot/efi in the options list)
1Gib swap
25 Gib for the operating system - mount point /

  1. before starting the installation, in the summary of the features which will be installed, i select manually the grub2-EFI because the default version isn’t EFI as you tell:

As far as I know, the opensuse installer does not have support for installing 32-bit efi booting. So it probably installed traditional MBR/BIOS booting, which won’t work on your system. But elilo should be able to do the trick.

4)the installation starts and ends without errors.

Restarted the machine neither the bios, nor rEFInd finds somthing to boot

As far as I know, the 32-bit kernels won’t have an efi stub. So they won’t look like an efi application to rEFInd (I think – I have no experience with that loader).

It is my impression that “elilo” can still load them. As far as I know’ “elilo” is an efi application but it can load a traditional kernel. You will need 32-bit elilo.

At least that is worth trying. I presume that a kernel and “initrd” were installed. You would have to copy those to your EFI partition and setup the elilo configuration to boot them.

Hi,
I tried to install elilo but i failed. i don’t understand how to install elilo on the asus from an usb. I’m sure I did something wrong.

Anyway I configured an entry menu in rEFInd config (refind.conf) for OpenSuse:



menuentry "OpenSUSE" {

icon \EFI\refind\icons\os_opensuse.png
loader \boot\vmlinuz-3.16.6-2-desktop
initrd  \boot\initrd-3.16.6-2desktop
options "root=fs1: ro"

}


and I recived this output:


Starting vmlinuz-3.16.6-2-desktop
Using load options 'root=fs1: ro initrd=\boot\initrd-3.16.6-2desktop'
Invalid loader file!
Error: Not Found while loading vmlinuz-3.16.6-2-desktop

maybe I use wrong path even if both vmlinuz and initrd are in fs1: \boot. The refind.conf is in fs0: \EFI\refind.

Recheck that “\boot\initrd-3.16.6-2desktop”. I would expect a hyphen between the “2” and the “desktop”. Maybe that’s just a copy error when posting.

Have you tried copying kernel and initrd to the refind directory and loading them from there?

Sorry i write wrong here, it’s correct in the script.

Yes, I tried to copy vmlinuz and initrd in the same folder of the script.

I also tried this minimal configuration:


...{
icon \EFI...
loader vmlinuz-3...
}



...{
icon \EFI...
loader \EFI\refind\vmlinuz-3...
}


whitout options and with vmlinuz-3… in the \EFI\refind but the output is the same.

the only thing I’m sure works correctly is icons because in the refind menu i see the opensuse img.

i don’t really know what I can do!:frowning:

hi everyone,
I have some news for you: something like an SO runs on my Asus TBook.
this is what I did:

  1. Put the bootia32.efi, mentioned above, in the EFI partitions using rEFInd shell after a successful installation
  2. After reboot it starts immediately the same grub shell i used to start the installation.
  3. Load the kernel usnig this code:

grub> set root=(hd0,gpt2)
grub> linux /boot/vmlinuz
grub> initrd /boot/initrd
grub> boot

After 15 mins it ends and tell me something that I don’t understand (i’m sure it’s talking about errors. i’ll post the output soon) and ask me to insert the system password.
Now I’m able to do all the things I can normally do with a terminal except use zypper, or anything needs internet connection, because WiFi interface doesn’t work. :frowning:

I win!!

For now this is the feature which i’m sure works/doesn’t works.

  • Touch screen OK
  • keyboard appears on the screen every time i focus a textbox
  • Wifi doesn’t works
  • G-sensor doesn’t works
  • Camera doesn’t works
  • Battery indicator doesn’t works
  • it doesn’t shut down correctly

I’ll post the guide to install OpenSUSE on the Asus TBook as soon as possible.