[FAQ] Asus T100: Installing custom OS (android/ubuntu/*nix/Windows 7/Windows 8 x64)

[rodion.zissou]

Let's get back on topic with the Android build for our T100!

Exclamation for excitement, not pushiness.

Sent from my SCH-I605 using Tapatalk

 

[costcutter]

Android on the ASUS T100 would be amazing

 

[rodion.zissou]

Android on the ASUS T100 would be amazing

It seems to be getting there. Android can run on x86 architecture, it's been done, it just needs to be optimized.

 

[KILLplay]

No x86 UEFI bootloader can't be too bad of a limitation. I'm trying to research it. was there a thread?

 

[zombie673]

A little incentive...

With the market flooding with the T100TA, I'm sure that there are going to be a lot of people looking for mods here. I'm throwing $20 to whoever figures out the kinks and gets a viable version of Android working on this machine. I have android tablets and just got the T100. I don't want to need both. We all know the benefits of both OSs and I think that dual booting this model would be make it the ultimate mobile computing tool, especially with x86 dropping their 4.4 release now. Keep up the development guys!!

Also, if anyone is looking for a fitted case, they're now available on ebay for about $20.

 

[tydem]

No x86 UEFI bootloader can't be too bad of a limitation. I'm trying to research it. was there a thread?

There are a few viable x86 EFI bootloaders for our device. Making the T100 dual boot Windows and (desktop) Linux is pretty easy if you install rEFInd onto the EFI partition, and from there you can boot anything including Windows, Linux kernels, and other bootloaders like GRUB2. Sadly rEFInd has a bug (that causes module version mismatch) with 3.13 kernels so booting directly with it is not recommended, it is better to just use it as a main menu and chain grub2 from there.

I tried Arch, openSUSE 13.1 and Kubuntu 14.04 (daily snapshot) and out of those, only Ubuntu and its derivatives recognize the touchscreen. SUSE has issues with the wireless, even after applying a custom kernel with the required modules and firmware. Also, since space is very limited on my 32GB model, with Windows giving me some 4,5 GB after shrinking, I installed Kubuntu into a compressed btrfs partition and placed GRUB and rEFInd on the EFI partition. Then I grabbed the 3.13 rc3 kernel debs from the mainline kernel repo and installed them. Amusingly, the pre-alpha Kubuntu 14.04 is far more stable than Windows 8.1 on this device, however there are a lot of missing drivers. All distributions I tested were 32-bit versions. Here's a list of missing or partially missing hardware features:

Partially working:
Display: efifb works fine if you uninstall the xorg vesa drivers, but is really slow on 3.12 kernels. On 3.13 it's much better, but still nowhere near smooth as it has no GPU acceleration at all. The modesetting driver, i915, does not work on either kernel. On 3.12 it shows a corrupted screen with a flickering bottom part and on 3.13 rc3/rc4 it just shows a blank screen upon setting the kernel graphics mode. So nomodeset is needed to boot correctly as of now.

Wireless: The brcmfmac driver works, but has very poor connection quality, to the extent that NetworkManager always fails to connect with it. With Wicd it is usable, provided the required firmware and nvram are present. (Thanks to lufasponge for providing instructions in this thread)

Touchpad: While the touchpad works, it is recognized as a basic mouse and lacks gesture support.

Not working:
Audio
Backlight control
Suspend to RAM (sleep)
Shutdown and reboot (it just hangs and you need to hold power to shut it down)
SD card reader
Camera
Battery level reporting
Orientation sensor
...and some I might have forgotten.

So to sum it all up the Linux support on this device is really basic, and it is nowhere near ready to be a daily driver. I hope someone can get modesetting on 3.13 to work as I have tried everything and all I got was the choice between a black screen or a garbled one. I will also see if I can get linux-next (the bleeding edge kernel from git) to build and then check if more features work.

 

[nemuro]

Now charging my t100 before first time use.

Glad to see someone is on track to a working android version on this wonderful device. Good job guys!

 

[sqalg]

Now charging my t100 before first time use.

Glad to see someone is on track to a working android version on this wonderful device. Good job guys!

hello
no more news of this android version ?

 

[SixSixSevenSeven]

hello
no more news of this android version ?

People may still be busy pigging out on mince pies rather than working on android

 

[TheMoro]

The i915 GPU driver does work fine *almost* out of the box for the 3.12 kernels. I havn't tested 3.13 yet, but the problem may be similar. The garbled screen is simply due to an incorrect resolution. It doesn't seem to detect our native resolution right. Using the boot parameter video=VGA-1:1366x768 works, at least when I tested it on Arch. For Ubuntu, the same boot parameter worked, but only for the console.The X session was still bad. From there I had to use xrandr to create a new video mode, and somehow manage to use the (still garbled) screen to access a terminal window. It worked, but I wouldn't recommend it You might also be able to setup an Xorg config to set the resolution on startup.
Just letting folks know, the GPU works at least in 3.12 kernels.

 

[zombie673]

So I just went back and read the entire thread. I am an experienced user of Windows and Android and have done a fair amount of tweaking, modding, and rooting and I can honestly say that I am ashamed to have thought I knew ANYTHING about modern mobile computing. Can someone take a minute to put into simpler terms what we are looking at or where things stand for getting a dual boot of android on our machines? It makes me feel like a complete noob to be this lost.

Thanks guys!

 

[paperWastage]

So I just went back and read the entire thread. I am an experienced user of Windows and Android and have done a fair amount of tweaking, modding, and rooting and I can honestly say that I am ashamed to have thought I knew ANYTHING about modern mobile computing. Can someone take a minute to put into simpler terms what we are looking at or where things stand for getting a dual boot of android on our machines? It makes me feel like a complete noob to be this lost.

Thanks guys!

(this below applies for any operating system that you try to put onto the Asus T100)

1. You need a 32-bit EFI bootloader
2. You need GPU driver for GPU-accelerated graphics

for basic linux distros, (1) means you need to compile grub2 in 32-bit EFI mode (or whatever your distro uses)
(2) - intel has GPU driver (i915), but it's buggy (as TheMoro mentioned two posts above this one)

for android, we have android-ia and android-x86 distros
(1) is tough, because compiling android is slightly more complicated than playing with ubuntu
(2) android-x86 has i915 support, but dunno if the latest is merged into the android-x86 codebase. right now, buggy as well

I haven't played with my t100 in december... maybe I'll find time this weekend

 

[devkon]

(this below applies for any operating system that you try to put onto the Asus T100)

1. You need a 32-bit EFI bootloader
2. You need GPU driver for GPU-accelerated graphics

for basic linux distros, (1) means you need to compile grub2 in 32-bit EFI mode (or whatever your distro uses)
(2) - intel has GPU driver (i915), but it's buggy (as TheMoro mentioned two posts above this one)

for android, we have android-ia and android-x86 distros
(1) is tough, because compiling android is slightly more complicated than playing with ubuntu
(2) android-x86 has i915 support, but dunno if the latest is merged into the android-x86 codebase. right now, buggy as well

I haven't played with my t100 in december... maybe I'll find time this weekend

paperwastage please tell me what i have to do in bcdedit to boot ubuntu 13.10,

i have installed it on internal emmc, installed grub on mmcp2 but nothing work on boot i have an error
with my bcd config.

thanks in advance

 

[paperWastage]

paperwastage please tell me what i have to do in bcdedit to boot ubuntu 13.10,

i have installed it on internal emmc, installed grub on mmcp2 but nothing work on boot i have an error
with my bcd config.

thanks in advance

copy pasty from a post I made somewhere else

once you installed ubuntu into the internal MMC (assuming install to /dev/mmcblk0p5, and boot loader into EFI partition /dev/mmcblk0p2)

you need to fix the EFI partition (remember the bootia32.efi fix for the flash drive? You have to do the similar hack for the internal MMC since the boot loader installater only installed the 64-bit bootx64.efi file to /dev/mmcblk0p2)

1. Boot back into the ubuntu flash drive.
2. Mount /dev/mmcblk0p2 onto /mnt/boot/ using root.
3. copy the bootia32.efi to /mnt/boot/EFI/ubuntu/
4. copy the /mnt/boot/EFI/ubuntu/grub.cfg to /mnt/boot/boot/grub/ (remember that my compiled bootia32.efi looks for grub.cfg at </root>/boot/grub... this step copies the relevant grub.cfg into the right location)
5. boot into windows. execute the following commands in cmd with admin access. this step means you chose grub2 to be the default bootloader
   

   bcdedit /set {bootmgr} path /EFI/ubuntu/bootia32.efi

   
   if you do "bcdedit /v" you'll see the first entry is pointing to the bootia32.efi
   
   when you restart, you'll see grub2 instead of the windows boot screen
   

 

[devkon]

copy pasty from a post I made somewhere else

thanks it worked

 

[paperWastage]

PM from olymk2 who doesn't have post access to this thread yet

okay finally got there here are the options to get a desktop using intel drivers, would you mind posting that some where for other people

you may also be intrested in this bug report https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/alsa-driver/+bug/1259099 mentions a file to look out for in the linux kernel, the below is for 14.04 ie ubuntu beta, thought it made sense to use that one and report bugs

also noticed sdcard does not work in linux any luck on this front ?

add to linux boot params in grub video=VGA-1:1368x768

create the below then your desktop will work with intel driver

/usr/share/X11/xorg.conf.d/10-monitor.conf

Section "Monitor"
    Identifier      "T100 Display"
    Modeline 	    "1368x768_60.00"   85.25  1368 1440 1576 1784  768 771 781 798 -hsync +vsync
    Option          "PreferredMode" "1368x768_60.00"
EndSection

Section "Device"
    Identifier      "Intel Valley View"
    Driver          "i915"
    Option          "Monitor-DVI-0" "External DVI"
EndSection

Section "Screen"
    Identifier      "Primary Screen"
    Device          "Intel Valley View"
    Monitor	    "T100 Display"
    DefaultDepth    24
    SubSection "Display"
        Depth           24
        Modes   "1368x768"
    EndSubSection
EndSection

Section "ServerLayout"
        Identifier      "Default Layout"
        Screen          "Primary Screen"
EndSection

 

[julyaann]

(this below applies for any operating system that you try to put onto the Asus T100)

I haven't played with my t100 in december... maybe I'll find time this weekend

Here I am biting my nails waiting for the king ... paperwastage magician do magic and can enjoy our t100 Android dualboot ...
Thanks a lot

 

[Husky997]

Anyone try dualboot or make a Android distro, It is possible or not. And maybe who's try Rom Image from Z27xx smartphones?
Win8.1 killing Android tablets if have a dualboot. Toshiba Encore and T100

BTW Maybe ASUS Transformer Book Trio Image works on T100?

 

[sarman_1998]

Boot android-x86 with one thumb drive

First thanks to everyone on this thread! I've been working hard to get android running on this think and all the info here is very helpful!
Here are a few thinks i've found

I figured out how to boot to android with just one drive instead of two.
Short version is, make a second partition on your thumb drive about 300mb ext4. i used a gparted live image to shrink the existing partition and add this new ext4 partition. For me it was /dev/sde2
Next do the step you used to do on the second drive
dd if=android-x86.iso of=/dev/sde2 (be sure to use the correct partition in your case. parted -l should get you a list to guess from)

I know at least parly why the install won't work. I was looking at the scripts under bootable/newinstaller in the source tree and i found when its searching for drives to install on, it is looking for /dev/sda* or /dev/hda*. On the T100, the storage is /dev/mmcblk0p*. I started changed scripts in there but that was a tangent from my main effort so I'm leaving it alone for now.

I've got the i915 graphics driver loading and partly working. It works when i'm still in text mode, but when i start the android graphics up, it switches from 1368x768 to 1024x768 then i just get a blank screen. I'm trying to trace that down now. Currently it looks like gralloc/kms is not passing the native resolution mode.

Eric

 

[simkad]

I've no knowledge about development on windows/android. This is my first win8.1 tablet/laptop.
Thanks for all the effort for bringing android dualboot for t100. Keep up ur good works guys..