Episode: 1854
Title: HPR1854: Installing Ubuntu on the Asus TP500L
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr1854/hpr1854.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-18 10:12:17

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This is HPR Episode 1854 entitled Installing Ubuntu on the ASUS DB 500M.
It is hosted by John Culp and is about 15 minutes long.
The summary is, I talk about the process of getting Ubuntu onto my son's new physics or laptop.
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All right, are we rolling?
Looks like it.
This is John Culp and Leppie at Louisiana, and I have found it increasingly difficult
to find time to record a podcast.
Now that the semester is going at school, the fall semester started up about a week
and a half ago.
Kids are back in school and it's just gotten awfully busy.
It's hard to find time to do this, so I'm going to talk while I'm walking on my way to
the office this morning.
I have a class at 8 a.m., right now it's 7.13, I expect it'll take about 10 minutes to
get there.
I'm going to talk on the way about something that shouldn't take up too much time.
It's about installing Ubuntu Linux on my son's laptop.
Now both of my kids ran CrunchBang Linux for pretty much their whole lives from the time
they had computers up until recently.
My daughter still runs Ubuntu, now she switched from CrunchBang because it seemed like it didn't
work with Minecraft and that was important to her, so we switched her over to Ubuntu.
But she is using the laptop that my son used to have before he got his new laptop.
Basically we used hand me down laptops.
For the longest time I always had the newest one and then whatever my old one was got handed
down to my son and then other one handed down to daughter and my wife kind of just grabbed
whatever was left over since all she really needed to do was check email and make documents
and stuff and the kids always wanted to play some kind of game which required more horsepower.
But from the time my kids were a little age 3 and up, whatever laptop they had access
to ran CrunchBang Linux and so they got totally used to it and had never even used Windows
computers until they got to school.
However my son needed a new laptop, I want to say 8 months or a year ago, the one he had
was just starting to not perform very well and stuff he was doing at school was requiring
Windows applications and stuff and so I'd finally just bought him a new laptop running
Windows 8.
It is ASUS and get the model number right here, I have it on my phone, ASUS TP500L, it's
pretty nice looking piece of hardware, I guess it's a 15 inch screen, it's a touch
screen and it flips around, you can take the screen and flip it all the way around and
fold it back against the underside of the laptop so it's like you're holding a great
big tablet and I don't think he uses the touch screen that much but it's kind of cool.
When I bought it I was fully aware that it had UEFI secure boot on it and for the longest
time assumed that I would not be able to put any kind of Linux on there but I decided
to take a closer look 8 months or so later, interestingly at first my son really hated
using Windows and not even because it was, well I think at first he assumed it was because
it was Windows because he was just used to Linux his whole life but then once he found
his way around and figured out where everything was he thought it was fine really.
He actually took a computer programming class over the summer where it was a good thing
that he had a Windows machine just because they were doing C-sharp, we signed them up
for this programming class from Duke University in the summer, it's for kids about his age,
14 years old and we signed them up for this online programming class not realizing that
the language they used was going to be C-sharp but whatever, the principles that he learned
in there were good and can be applied to any number of programming languages and he had
a good time doing it, he wrote some interesting programs and he even wrote another program
after the class was finished, he wrote his own random password generator which works
pretty well actually and so he didn't really mind using Windows but then recently he clicked
the button that went upgrade to Windows 10 and the Windows 10, it's reputation anyway is
that it's not very good in terms of user privacy and stuff like that and so it got me to
think, you know what, I just walking along here by the engineering building and I just
found a USB 2 micro USB cable that's about one foot long lying on the ground so I'm going
to take it, put that in my pocket right here, got me a new cable, you can't ever have too
many of those USB micro USB cables, anyway so the alleged privacy concerns about Windows 10
got me to thinking again about maybe putting a Ubuntu Linux on his laptop, we disabled
all of the privacy problem issues that we could find on Windows 10 but I keep hearing that
there are other ones that are hidden that you won't be able to disable and so whatever,
I started looking into it and found that yes people had installed Ubuntu on to this laptop,
I chose Ubuntu just because it's got so much widespread usage and it's not because it's
necessarily the easiest one to use but since this laptop does have a touch screen I wanted
to make sure that he was using a distro that had good touch screen support as well.
So the first problem was to try to get the thing to boot from a USB stick and it's not
so easy on these new fangled laptops, they don't make it easy to get into the BIOS and
especially not to boot from something other than the hard drive that they want you to boot
from, sorry I've got a lot of environmental noise right here, I'm walking past Oliver
Hall which is the home of the Center for Advanced Computer Studies at our university, not
too many students around right now because it's only quarter after seven in the morning.
So I seemed like I recalled that you had to go like somewhere inside the Windows GUI to mess
around with the system settings and so I found after searching a little bit that you can do an
advanced restart option by shift clicking on the restart button inside Windows. So I did
that and followed my nose to get to the advanced boot up options. One of them is to boot into system
setup that looks promising so I did that and voila I'm into the BIOS. So there are a couple
of things that you have to do in the BIOS before you're going to be able to, oh it's really
noisy around this corner, sorry about that. There are a couple of things you have to change in
the BIOS before you're going to be able to boot from a USB, especially a USB running Linux and
not Windows or something like that. Thankfully it was pretty easy to disable secure boot,
I heard that there are some BIOS or motherboards or whatever that don't even allow you to disable
the secure boot but this one was pretty easy. You just went over to the security tab and then a down
arrowed all the way to the bottom where it said something about using secure boot and just click
it or you can't click, you press enter whatever and then spacebar to change the value to disable and so
that disables the secure boot. That's one step. A giant air conditioner next to the chemistry
building here. Sorry about that. Then on the boot tab I read on some ASUS support form that to
boot from a USB you have to disable secure boot and then enable something they called CSM,
compatibility support mode. So I did that and then tried to boot from the USB with the Ubuntu
image on it and it didn't work. It kept telling me to insert a suitable boot medium and so I went
back into the system BIOS and then disabled CSM like it had been before and tried one more time
by the way to get to the Windows 10 boot menu on startup you have to, oh one more thing, you have
to disable what is it. There's something called fast boot. Yeah on the boot tab in the BIOS you have
to disable fast boot before the stuff will work I think. Then when you restart the machine hold down
the escape key and a little dialog box will pop up asking which thing you want to boot from and so
you choose the USB and after having disabled secure boot and disabling CSM the compatibility support
mode I was able to boot from the USB stick. So I got the Ubuntu live session going. Checked out a
few things found out that the touchscreen worked fine. Two fingers scrolling was working and that
was important to my son because after upgrading to Windows 10 he found that two fingers scrolling
on his touchpad didn't work anymore and there seemed to be no way to fix it. So he was happy that
that seemed to work so after verifying that it was going to work pretty well the one thing that
didn't work was the wireless but I read and found that there's a way to make it work once you have
the system installed. So we went ahead and after poking around in the live session for a bit rebooted
and installed it I had to reboot because I wanted to make sure he had a chance to backup certain
files just in case we rebooted and installed the Ubuntu the long-term support release alongside
of Windows 10 and so now he can do a boot. I did get the wireless working although it took a couple
of reboots and a couple of tries with an installation script that somebody had published online.
I don't remember where it was but you essentially had to get the I guess the Windows driver from
the ASUS website and put it in the right place and run a couple of things and make some symbolic
links and he did somebody made a script that does all this stuff for you and so it works now.
The only thing that still doesn't really work quite right is it has to do with power management.
The suspend and resume is problematic. It seems to work okay if you suspend it using the GUI
menu and then open the lid back up but then if you just close the lid it doesn't start back up
the right way crossing the street now trying not to get run over by cars so I'm at the corner
across from my building and just about to make it look light. It's changed. Walking across the street
I don't see if there's anything else I wanted to mention here. Yeah that's about it.
Anyway I feel a whole lot better now about the privacy and security of his laptop when he's
running on the Ubuntu side. We wanted to keep the Windows 10 partition just because there are
certain things that he has to do related to school work collaborating with friends on projects.
Stuff like that where it really is just it saves everybody a lot of work if he just uses
MS office like everyone else they don't have compatibility issues and spend a whole lot of time
screwing around trying to make things look right after somebody's system messes it up.
For that kind of compatibility we kept it although I think since the moment going into my building now
oh it's suddenly so quiet it's also very cold in here
to somebody else. Since the moment we installed Ubuntu on there he hasn't even booted back into windows
yet and I should probably at least try that at some point to make sure that the dual boot really
works. It's one thing it does when you install a Ubuntu on this thing it puts the grub boot manager
in instead of the normal windows boot up and so I can see that windows 10 is still on the list of
available boot options but we have not yet even tried it he stayed on the Linux side
and seems to like it just fine apart from the suspend problem but he's slowly getting into the
habit of suspending from the GUI menu instead of simply slapping the lid closed like he was used
to. Anyway I guess that's it I'm at work it's time for me to get after it I got a class in 34
minutes and I better prep myself. I'll talk to you guys later bye
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