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Booting Ubuntu on the Asus Transformer Book T10010/28/2013 at 12:51 PM by Brad Linder

The Asus Transformer Book is a tablet/notebook device with a 10 inch touchscreen display, a keyboardand touchpad, and an Intel Atom Z3740 Bay Trail processor. It ships with Windows 8.1 software, and it

works pretty well as a Windows tablet, notebook, or even desktop PC .

But what if you want to use a different operating system? Sure, you can do that too.

I was able to take Ubuntu 13.04 Linux for a spin on the Asus Transformer Book T100. At this point,

bunch of key features dont work yet, including WiFi or touchscreen support and the screen resolution

is stuck at 800 x 600 pixels. Ubuntu 13.10 wont boot.

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But I suspect it wont take developers long to figure out how to get Ubuntu and other operating systems

to support the Transformer Books hardware.

As of late October, 2013 its actually pretty tricky to convince the Asus Transformer Book T100 to boot

anything other than Windows 8.1. Its easy to get to the Windows advanced boot options or the UEFI

firmware options and spot the options that should let you boot a different operating system from external

storage. But most operating systems wont boot, and will instead just dump you back into the Windowsbootloader.

But developer paperWastage discovered that CloneZilla did boot. So by figuring out what made the

CloneZilla image special, paperWastage figured out how to boot Ubuntu Linux.

You can find detailed instructions at the xda-developers forum , but heres a simplified list of steps I took

to create a bootable USB flash drive using a Windows PC.

Warning: Note that these steps might not work for everyone and if you accidentally end up with a

computer that wont boot, Ill offer some troubleshooting tips, but youre entirely responsible for breaking

(and hopefully fixing) your own device.

Preparing a bootable Ubuntu 13.04 USB flash drive


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1. Download ubuntu-13.04-desktop-amd64.iso from the Ubuntu download page . Newer versions of

Ubuntu dont yet seem to work.

2. Download Rufus , a tool for creating bootable USB drives.

3. Download and unzip paperWastages bootia32.ubuntu_13.04_x64.zip file.

4. Plug a 1GB or larger USB flash drive into your computer.

5. Double-click the Rufus file you downloaded to launch the utility.

6. Choose the drive letter for the flash drive you jut plugged in under the Device drop-down menu.

7. Use the following settings: GPT partition scheme, FAT file system, 64 kilobyte cluster size.

8. Make sure the box that says Create a bootable disk using is checked, and choose ISO Image andclick the drive icon on the right to open an Explorer window and find your Ubuntu 64-bit disk image.

9. Click start.


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At this point, your computer will format the flash drive (and erase any data thats already on it so make

sure to backup any important files) and prepare it as a bootable drive that lets you run or install Ubuntu.

When the process is complete, move on to the next step.

10. Open an Explorer window and navigate to the newly prepared flash drive.

11. There should be a folder labeled EFI. Click it to open that folder. Then click the folder labeled

BOOT to navigate to that folder.

12. Copy the bootia32.efi file from step 3 into this folder (make sure youve unzipped it first).

Thats it. Your flash drive is now ready. Go ahead and eject it from your PC.

Booting Ubuntu on the Asus Transformer Book T100

The first thing we need to do is disable secure boot on the Transformer Book. Thats pretty easy to do,

with these steps. Note that you can complete these steps with the USB drive plugged in or without it

but I had a bit more luck without it.

1. Swipe from the right side of the screen to bring up the Charms menu.

2. Tap Settings.

3. Choose the Change PC settings option at the bottom.

4. On the following screen tap Update and recovery.

5. At the next screen, choose recovery.

6. Under the Advanced startup section, choose Restart now.


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7. This will reboot your device to a blue screen with large icons. Choose the one that says Troubleshoot.

8. At the following screen choose Advanced Options.

9. Next, select UEFI Firmware Settings.

10. Finally hit the Restart button.

This will reboot your device into the UEFI settings area, which looks like an old-school BIOS menu. The

touchscreen and touchpad wont work here, but you can navigate using the arrow keys and enter key on

the keyboard.

11. Use the arrow keys to get to the Security tab.

12. Scroll down to Secure Boot menu and hit Enter.

13. Make sure Secure Boot Support is selected, and hit Enter again to bring up a screen that says

Enabled or Disabled.

14. Choose Disabled and hit enter.


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15. Hit the Esc key.

Now Secure Boot is disabled. You could theoretically save and exit at this point. But instead, this is the

time when Id recommend plugging in the USB flash drive.

Once its plugged in, move on to the next step.

16. Move over to the Save & Exit tab, highlight Save Changes and Exit and hit Enter.

17. As the system reboots, press and hold the F2 key so that you return to the UEFI Settings menu.

18. This time when you navigate to the Save & Exit menu you should see an option under Boot Override

that says UEFI and has the name of your USB flash drive.

19. Select that boot override option and hit enter.

If all goes according to plan, your device should now boot into a GRUB bootloader menu, giving you the

option of trying or installing Ubuntu.

I strongly suggest you use the Try Ubuntu without installing option at this point unless you really

know what youre doing. This will let you run Ubuntu without altering your Windows files at all.


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Getting past the command line.

Were not quite done yet though. While Ubuntu should boot up on your system at this point, youll

probably see the Ubuntu logo for a moment or two and then get dumped out at a command prompt.

Heres how to get past that point:

1. Type the following commands, and hit enter after each.

2. cd /

3. cd usr/lib/xorg/modules/drivers/

4. sudo rm vesa_drv.so

5. startx

You should see a flurry of text scroll by and then a mouse cursor will appear on screen. A moment later,

you should see the full Ubuntu Unity desktop environment.


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Keep in mind, you wont be able to use WiFi out of the box, since Ubuntu doesnt recognize the devices

wireless adapter. The screen resolution will be stuck at 800 x 600, which could look funny. And theres

no touchscreen support so while you can detach the screen from the keyboard, you wont be able to

do much with it.

The user interface may also be a bit sluggish in order to get the X Server to load a graphical user

interface, we had to delete the vesa graphics driver. It may be possible to load an alternate driver to

improve performance.

But now that we know its possible to get alternate operating systems to boot on the Transformer Book

T100, it should also be possible for people to figure out how to configure them to take advantage of thetablet/notebook hybrids hardware.

How do I get back to Windows?

When you logout of Ubuntu you can shut down or restart the computer. If the system freezes (or youre

impatient), you can also press and hold the power button until the tablet shuts down.

You can then press and hold it again to restart the tablet. Unfortunately, youll probably be greeted by a

screen with the Asus logo and the text Preparing BitLocker recovery.

Heres how to get back to Windows from here:

1. Wait until you see a blue screen and choose the Skip this drive link at the bottom of the page.

Thisll take you to a troubleshoot screen like we saw in the section above. The only difference is you can

use the keyboard and touchpad to make your selections, but not the touchscreen.


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2. Choose Troubleshoot and then Advanced Options again, and then select UEFI Firmware Settings

and hit Restart.

3. Move over to the Save & Exit tab and select Restore Defaults and hit Enter.

4. Save Changes and Exit and you should reboot into Windows.

Troubleshooting tips

If step 17 and later in the Booting Ubuntu section, you may end up in the same Bitlocker recovery

section as listed above.

The good news is that you can use the same steps to get back to Windows but this time after you hit

the Skip this drive section, if you have your bootable USB drive plugged in, you should also see an

option to Use a device.

Select that option and choose the name of your drive on the next screen and you should boot into

Ubuntu/GRUB bootloader instead of Windows.

Make sure to be careful when playing around with the Advanced options menus. There are some options

that will reinstall Windows or even wipe your data.


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76 Comments

Luis Gonzalez Hopefully, other OEMs and future ASUS Bay Trail notebooks don't make it so hard to boot another OS.

What WiFi card is this using? I wonder what's the issue with the resolution since the Ivy Bridge basedgraphics should be pretty good on Linux.

Anyway, I'm skipping on this notebook (that's how I had planned on using this) and waiting on the Z3770or Bay Trail M based ultraportables with more RAM and, hopefully, a 64-bit UEFI capable of booting64-bit boot loaders.

Yuhong Bao Yea, look for systems shipping with 64-bit Windows, which should ship with 64-bit UEFI firmware.

me

Ya, I'm going to wait on other 10" Bay Trail notebooks. My reasons are more superficial though.2 GB of RAM is enough for what I intend to do on an ultraportable notebook. I would haveinstalled the 32-bit version of Xubuntu anyway in order to not get the issues related to having a32-bit UEFI, 32-bit boot loader and 64-bit OS. I'm more concerned how that back/lid is so uglyand shiny. Looks so tacky.

As for graphics drivers, the Ivy Bridge core is well supported in Linux but the hooks specificallyfor Bay Trail are only in the more recent kernel and Mesa versions. They may get backported toLTS kernels or by distros. I'd also like to know what WiFi chip this uses. Hopefully, it isn't acrappy Broadcom chip.

CyberGusa

It's unfortunate that Asus decided to use the 32bit UEFI and I wrongly assumed they would notmake that mistake...

Most distros are also just still designed to work with BIOS instead of UEFI and all these mobile

Windows devices will be using UEFI exclusively...

Mind, the Linux Community has already released a boot loader that also has its own public keyand can work with Secure Boot enabled... So a lot of issues are just because the setup hasn'tbeen updated to work with UEFI yet.

Still, the issue is mainly with the distro itself, as shown by the limitations shown in this video,because developers need to get a hold of the actual hardware to properly develop drivers, etc.

The Linux community has only started adding support, like Kernel 3.11 introduced support for Bay Trail audio but it still has a bit to go before full support is native.


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