hpr-knowledge-base/hpr_transcripts/hpr1991.txt

Episode: 1991
Title: HPR1991: Adventures installing Linux on an Asus EeeBook X205A
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr1991/hpr1991.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-18 12:57:44

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This is HPR Episode 1991 entitled Adventure Installing Linux on an ASUS EVO kex 205A.
It is hosted by B.E. and is about 18 minutes long.
The summer is, installation instructions from lessons learned the hard way.
This episode of HPR is brought to you by AnanasThost.com.
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Hi, this is B.E. Z, signing back in for Hacker Problem Radio.
It's been a little bit of time since the last time I recorded, but I have a couple cool things to talk about.
So I'll do this one, I'll probably do one more after this.
This time we're going to talk about installing any Linux distro, specifically Ubuntu 1510, Ubuntu Mate 1510 on an ASUS triple ebook X205A.
I was looking for something that was really small.
My biggest and I kept on searching on new egg and on Amazon for something that met my requirements,
something that needed to be really small lightweight and had a really good battery life.
I was leaning towards a Chromebook for a while because I figured it would be easier to get Linux on it.
But then I saw this and I thought this would be really good.
By, I found an open box ASUS triple ebook for $149.99, brand new open box on new egg.
Usually it's about $250 off.
So these guys are basically asking me to just buy this thing.
There's no risk of washing, it's almost free.
So I decided to get it and I did, I honestly underestimated how hard it was going to be to get it on.
I haven't had to worry about this because I've had either system 76 computers which always have Linux installed and always are easy to reload with other distributions as you want.
Or old Dell's that are really easy as well.
So I had to worry about the broken chip, that's about it.
So I said, how hard could it be?
So first thing I did, I looked at the, I got it.
I didn't want to accept the ULO from Microsoft.
So I immediately turned off, went to the BIOS, turned off SCREBOOT and eventually turned SCREBOOT back on because it went to has an EFI support.
It turned off SCREBOOT so I could get it to get the boots you made installed or Monten.
And it turns out I had downloaded the 32 bits thinking that since it only has two gig of RAM that it would be a good idea.
So little did I know that the machine has EFI and there are no the Ubuntu distributions that have in their installer EFI.
So I had to do 64 bit which wasn't a problem, the processor which is a Intel atom.
It's like a Z23, 2837, something like that.
You can look it up, I have it in the show notes, some of the specs and stuff.
But it supports that, but it's really kind of a waste because of the limited RAM and the limited Betro atom processor.
But it turns out that I had to go with 64 bit, but 64 bit has a 64 bit version of EFI grub on it.
So the first time I tried a boot off it, I never even recognized that there was a bootable drive inserted.
And it took me a while looking online, figured out that what you have to do is you have to actually install a 32 bit version of EFI on the 64 bit installer.
So there's a couple of different ways to do it you can either download the source code and compile it.
I also found a link to it already pre-compiled.
So I put that in the show notes as well.
And all you have to do from that at that point is after I use DD, actually I use DCFL DD to get to turn an ISO into a USB stick.
Because that way at the end it can put hash equals MD5 or H265 and it'll automatically after it's done.
I also put the hash so you can see if the DD works properly.
So I recommend using these DCFL DD if you can.
Anyway, once it's on there, you just have to take the 32 bit version of grub and stick it in the EFI folder under root EFI boot.
Just stick it right next to the 64 bit. You don't have to remove the 64 bit version, just put it in there.
Then it, when you start up, it'll recognize.
So I went through that, got it to boot, said yes.
Got everything to install.
I saw a couple of guides online which I'm including in the show notes that helped me get through all the difficulties that I had.
But it wasn't really that bad. The biggest deal is that there is no support for the real-tech sound card that's in here.
Even though I'm actually recording this on the X205 right now, I'm doing it through a USB headset because the sound works through there just fine.
But the real-tech is one of those single port audio video that isn't working and the speakers don't work either.
And everywhere online it doesn't work.
I'm hoping that a future release of the kernel will update it.
And it will work, but right now it doesn't.
But getting back to where it was, so boot, boots.
I figured it would be a problem with getting on the internet, which there was.
But it's actually a really easy fix.
You just have to basically designate which one of the items in your firmware is your version of the Broadcom chip.
It's in the show notes. You basically have to just make a hard link or actually I didn't do a hard link.
I copied the NV-RAM.
I copied the NV-RAM ID into the firmware settings.
And like I said, it's in the show notes. I don't feel like looking it up right now.
I'm trying to do all this without using notes. So forgive me if it's a little rambly.
But I'm trying not to. I wanted to do this show and I didn't want to have a lot of barriers like writing the notes ahead of time.
So I'm just winging it.
Anyway, getting that after you after you move the copy the file from the firmware of the location to the proxys.
EFI E5R's location. All you have to do after that is just go into modprobe and remove BRMACF, BRM, you know, the Broadcom module.
And with modprobe-R, BRMACF, whatever it is, and then modprobe it back up.
And then all of a sudden it works.
Which is really important because this computer is so thin it doesn't have room for ethernet cable.
So only 32 bit of RAM of hard drive space on it, but it has a spot for microSD and actually have 128 gigabyte SD card that was for free that I got with my LG G4 as a part of a promotion.
So I slapped that in here and now it's like one of the biggest hard drives that happen to laptop right now.
It's kind of cool. Anyway, once the Wi-Fi came up, you know, to do the update and upgrade, bring down all the new stuff.
And then the next thing was to get that card to work, the SD card to work.
So there's another little thing I have to go into, grab default settings and make a modification there, which is also in the students, to make sure that the SD card and the Broadcom card didn't interfere with each other.
And sometimes when I boot, it still does have a problem. So I don't know if I'm going to take the time to figure it out.
But if when I do have the problem, the SD card always works.
But I have to modprobe, dash R, be on the Broadcom chip and then bring it back up and then everything works again.
Sometimes when I start, I think sometimes if I log in too fast, so getting into the boot screen and putting in my username and password and getting into fast, the Broadcom chip never gets recognized.
I think that's what it is, but I haven't spent that much time worrying about it.
Okay, so after getting the wireless working, the SD card working, everything seems to be working just fine.
Except for I took, I tried to boot it again and it doesn't boot.
I can stick the, the mate, the boots about to, I so thumb drive it and again, and that'll boot, but system won't boot itself.
I do the live and I go into live environment again. I go into boot EFI, nothing's in the directory.
I try to just move sub manual into directory, try to boot it, it doesn't work.
I look for some other places to make it work.
I'm not that good with, with Grub, I don't have that much experience messing around with Grub.
So the only thing for maybe the first couple of days, half a week, that, or maybe even the whole week that I was using this new laptop,
I had to keep the thumb drive, the life's thumb drive with me so that can go into Grub and just go, you know,
do the Grub commands to select my kernel, select my init, rd, and boot it.
So I had to do that. I'm like, this can't be the way I'm going to use this computer.
So think about giving it back, setting it back at this point.
I look around a little more line, I found this thing on GitHub that says what to do with this exact, basically with this exact problem.
But it's referring to 1410, but it's the same as that computer.
At the end, I'm like, well, I did all these, it has all of the similar instructions at the beginning.
But at the end, it talks about how to get Grub to work.
And so there's a Git clone to bring down from Git, that's a van of that, you know, that word, the Git Grub,
and then configure it with platform equals EFI, target equals I386,
and make, and then CD, Grub core, and then run Grub install, dash d, dot, dash dash, EFI, dash directory,
slash boot slash EFI, dash dash target equals I386, CD, into the boot slash EFI,
slash capital EFI, and then copy Grub, slash Grub32, I32.EFI, into a new directory that you call a boom to.
So did all that, once again, this is going to be in the show notes as well.
It's kind of hard to follow along when people are giving command line items.
So, and usually people don't try to do it with at the same time, especially something that's involved as installing a distro.
But anyway, got that there.
So I tried that, just copy this stuff in there.
Did pseudo reboot since I was already in the command line, and it came back up and it booted.
And so, thankfully, this little computer has been great since then.
The Intel Atom processor is exactly what I thought it would be.
Nothing more, nothing less.
The graphics are exactly what they thought I thought they would be.
So it's a 1368 x 7, 1366 x 768 screen, which actually doesn't look too bad in 11.64 factor.
And it's the glossy screen, not the matte screen, which is good for this caliber of computer because in my experience,
these like 200, 250 dollar computers that have the matte finish always have that washed out look.
And I appreciated that this one didn't have that.
So in terms of what it looks like, I went to make tweak or math these week and turned off compositing.
Because what I primarily use this for is basically them. It's my little bit machine.
And so, seeking with Dropbox or being on my network using my NFS mounted shares,
doing development work or taking notes, that's all I wanted to use it for.
So I can be in Starbucks with a really light thing and put it in my handle.
Not even have to carry a laptop back and just be that mobile.
So it's doing exactly what I wanted to do perfectly.
Actually, I'm using W3M a lot more than I used to.
I used to use links a lot and use Firefox when I'm not using links.
And Firefox works, but it just boots kind of slow. It starts up kind of slow.
As you can imagine, because on my i7 processor, it's not the fastest thing.
So I obviously don't know until Adam is not going to go very fast, but once you're in there and you're doing stuff, it's fine.
And the 2GB RAM actually is fine for everything that I do.
I never have more than 3 or 4 tabs open.
And then if I need to do stuff more powerful, I'll SSH into other machines.
And I also have offload a lot of the work that I might do onto other machines.
I have a Raspberry Pi that instead of being able to have virtual environments on this computer,
I have a Raspberry Pi that all this is a web server for this Django app developing.
So it just runs that all day and I just go in there and do everything.
So no matter what computer I'm on, I'm always on the Raspberry Pi.
Then I use Pandak a lot and running Pandak on this or the Raspberry Pi is not the fastest thing in the world.
But instead of wasting all that space, especially the gigabyte that it takes to get text live on working with Pandak,
I just put that on a Raspberry Pi B Plus that I have.
And so, and I set up a little thing with InCron that when I put a file in a folder,
it all actually runs a Pandak command to turn it into a PDF and put it into another folder.
I'm going to do another show on that about how cool InCron is and how you can work with it.
But that's so having lots of little small little small Intel, Adam, and our base processors on my land makes it so I can, you know,
use the power of all of them together instead of each of them individually.
But yeah, that's my story. I'm really satisfied with this little Navy blue.
I'm going to use X205A and I hope to be using it more and more in the future.
It's not going to take the place of my desktop computer or my laptop, which were both systems every six.
It's not meant to. I didn't have any illusions that I was going to do all the things that I do on those machines.
It was a purchase for a specific reason and it does the things that I wanted to do.
In general, I'm very happy with this purchase after it took a little bit of work.
And hopefully as this gets a little bit older, some of those things will be considered.
I know that a lot of Linux distributions right now aren't even considering putting EFI support on 386.
This is trying to not do three, these six formatted distros in general a lot.
I know a lot of people are dropping support for it, but the idea of having a 32-bit version of EFI on the installer,
I don't think it's too much to ask on the 64-bit version so that these load,
and we don't just give all these low-end specced computers to Microsoft and say,
well, they're not for Linux. If we can make it a little bit easier, I think they'll be good little machines to run.
But that's it. Thank you for your time and this is Be Easy, signing off.
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