I have this new Asus laptop that says it’s model E403S, and unfortunately it comes with Microsoft Windows 10 installed. These are my notes on trying to install Linux (specifically Debian GNU/Linux 8.6, a version of “jessie”) on it.
So far I have gotten Debian to boot on it, despite UEFI, but I have not been successful installing it to the disk. Also, X is running at 800×600 (on a 1920×1080 screen), and the touchpad doesn’t work.
By contrast, the current Linux Mint installs fine and everything works (encrypted install including swap, 1920×1080, touchpad, Wi-Fi, sound input and output, access to the 100GB SSD, webcam) except hibernation. I may return to Debian at some point.
This step can take a while; for me it was a bit under an hour. Start it first unless you’re on a very-high-speed internet connection. Some of the other steps can be done in parallel.
The best way to download Debian CD images is using zsync, and the best image to download is typically one of the “+nonfree” ones which have the drivers you need in order to bring up Wi-Fi successfully. These are “unofficial” because Debian does not condone the use of non-free software.
I did this with this command:
time zsync http://cdimage.debian.org/cdimage/unofficial/non-free/cd-including-firmware/8.6.0-live+nonfree/amd64/iso-hybrid/debian-live-8.6.0-amd64-standard+nonfree.iso.zsync
The resulting ISO file was 494927872 bytes and had the following cryptographic hashes:
sha256sum 496bef6cba35d5348d5cb2662f649f1949b0d9ee4a4b4ea7addf46b369a70507 debian-live-8.6.0-amd64-standard+nonfree.iso
sha1sum 60e52866683d7205adabc6c41d2f0ce04d159b77 debian-live-8.6.0-amd64-standard+nonfree.iso
md5sum d79befa133725bb07251feb81a980ccc debian-live-8.6.0-amd64-standard+nonfree.iso
The “standard” live “CD” doesn’t bring up a GUI environment, but it’s half the size of the alternatives that do (472 megabytes vs. 1.1+ gigabytes).
zsync is the best option because it detects and can recover from data transmission errors, and can restart after an interruption after taking only about 20 to 200 seconds to resynchronize. If I understand correctly, it checks the truncated MD4 of each block of the file and the SHA-1 of the whole file. It’s like a less demanding version of rsync.
The Debian Live images are in “hybrid ISO” format, which means they are bootable under ancient BIOS from either USB or CD/DVD. Unfortunately, although the official instructions don’t mention this, they are not bootable via UEFI, so I followed the following steps to get Debian to boot from USB under UEFI, as explained by Desmond86 in a Debian User Forums thread.
I formatted the USB stick as FAT32 (so UEFI would understand it) using
sudo cfdisk /dev/sdc, creating a type-0c partition filling the
entire disk, and then running sudo mkfs -t vfat /dev/sdc1. Then I
mounted it with sudo mount /dev/sdc1 /mnt and copied Shell.efi
from
https://svn.code.sf.net/p/edk2/code/trunk/edk2/ShellBinPkg/UefiShell/X64/Shell.efi
into /mnt.
In SVN revision 22855, Shell.efi is 909280 bytes and has the
following checksums:
sha256sum 889a1f28051955fc33a9512901b2d0f5a5d500750e09fb7caf21defb1fd3b657 Shell.efi
sha1sum 6621d657f470c3902ab1bc2423e45e74d5c286cc Shell.efi
md5sum 8f2922f6d148c5a5776cf16c8952a1f4 Shell.efi
Then, I mounted the Debian ISO with sudo mkdir /iso; sudo mount -o
loop debian-live-8.6.0-amd64-standard+nonfree.iso /iso and copied its
contents onto the USB stick.
This was tricky; here’s the command that finally worked:
time sudo cp -iLr /iso/{a*,.d*,di*,[f-z]*} /mnt/
The weird filename specification is to avoid copying the circular
symlink called debian (which, fortunately, isn’t strictly necessary)
or the .. directory entry. I used -r rather than -a to avoid
errors about not being able to set ownerships on FAT32. The -L flag
is to avoid errors about not being able to create symbolic links on
FAT32. The missing symlinks might prevent some firmware files from
being found (although it wasn’t necessary to get my Wi-Fi working the
first time around). The -i flag is to stop and tell me what’s going
on if there are clashes with files already there (like if I forgot to
delete this stuff previously). This copying takes about five minutes
(with one of the larger images, the Mate one) on my USB stick, most of
which is copying /iso/live/filesystem.squashfs, although that
depends on the speed of the USB stick in question. Mine is only
writing at 5 megabytes per second, as shown by iostat 10 in another
window.
The following command was useful for watching the progress of the
copying and figuring out what went wrong; it will go wrong itself if
you have another cp command running somewhere.
watch -d -n .1 'sudo lsof -p $(pidof cp) | tail'
Things I tried for copying that didn’t quite work:
cp -a …, which spews lots of error messages about failing to
create symlinks (because FAT32 doesn’t support them) and failing to
set file ownership (because FAT32 doesn’t support that either).cp -iLr /iso /mnt, which puts everything in /mnt/iso.cp -iLr /iso/{.,}* /mnt, but it ends up trying to copy my
entire filesystem onto the USB stick, including /usr and whatnot.cp -iLr /iso/{*,.[^.],.??*} /mnt/, which almost works, but copies
everything into both /mnt and /mnt/debian, doubling the space usage. Then I created a text file called /mnt/liveboot.nsh containing
just this line:
live\vmlinuz initrd=live\initrd.img append boot=live components
This isn’t actually necessary for what I’m doing, since I’m going to erase Windows completely. I thought I had to do this to get into the BIOS setup, but I was wrong. It is necessary, however, to avoid filesystem corruption if you want to dual-boot and have any filesystems available to both Windows and Linux.
In Windows 10, I got to this via Settings (Windows → Settings) in System → Power & Sleep → Additional Power Settings, which takes me to Control Panel → Hardware and Sound → Power Options, from which I choose “Choose what the power buttons do” in the left sidebar, followed by “Change settings that are currently unavailable”, which makes a “Shutdown settings” section appear, containing a checkbox for “Turn on fast startup (recommended)”, which I unchecked, followed by clicking the “Save changes” button. The rumors that a locked filing cabinet guarded by a leopard is involved are unfounded.
Then I shut Windows down from the Windows → Power menu.
During the ASUS splash screen, before the blue-background Windows booting screen starts, pressing Esc gives a “Please select boot device” menu, one of whose options is “Enter setup”.
This part is tricky and dangerous, because the BIOS
Once I had the UEFI-bootable USB stick and disabled secure boot (in
BIOS setup, under “Security”, “Secure Boot menu”, set “Secure Boot
Control” to “Disabled”) I was able to add the EFI shell as a boot
option as follows. In BIOS setup, in “Boot”, with the USB stick
plugged in, I selected “Add New Boot Option”, whose resulting menu
contains “Add boot option” (prompting for an arbitrary but mandatory
name, such as “walnuts”) and “Path for boot option”, which allowed me
to navigate to “PCI(14|0)\USB(0,09)\HD(Part1,Sig0D30060D)” and then
select the “Shell.efi” file I’d put on the USB stick in the previous
section. Then I selected “Create”, used Esc to get back to the
previous menu and see that my new boot option was selected. Upon
pressing F10 to reboot, I got the UEFI Interactive Shell, which has
the USB stick mapped as FS1: and apparently the internal disk mapped
as FS0:; I can dir FS0:\EFI and see Microsoft in there, while dir
FS1: shows me the contents of the USB stick.
Typing liveboot and hitting “enter” runs the liveboot.nsh batch file
mentioned in the previous section, booting Debian.
The BIOS version on this machine is 213, which ASUS’s page (see below) tells me is from 2015-11-10.
The Debian kernel isn’t seeing the disk, and AskUbuntu suggests that this may be fixed by upgrading the BIOS.
So I loaded version 301 of the BIOS, date 2016-10-21, from ASUS’s page. This page says it’s for model E403SA, but the tag on the laptop says the model is both “E403S” and “E403SA-US21”. The file I got is 2847438 bytes and has the following cryptographic checksums:
sha256sum a9f49a64fae2d915a2b9b6f7c515bfd4473a50f1ba4db071fa6e554397045113 E403SAAS301zip.zip
md5sum 3204c1bb9527bba7777cd89a4a528dbb E403SAAS301zip.zip
sha1sum a8f6ffc513d14e47b2771e737c753ecc40c5a55b E403SAAS301zip.zip
The option to update the BIOS is in the BIOS setup under “Advanced”: “Start Easy Flash”. This is supposed to be able to read the above zip file from USB media. Unfortunately it insists on being plugged in to AC power, and I left the adaptor elsewhere tonight. So for now I’m kind of stuck at this point, although I can run a live Debian system from USB.
For whatever reason, the Debian Live USB image I booted
(debian-live-8.6.0-amd64-standard+nonfree.iso) gives me a login
prompt instead of automatically launching a desktop or an installer.
I logged in with the login name user and the password live (these
are documented on Stack
Overflow)
and ran sudo debian-installer-launcher.
A few steps into the installer, it queried me for the wireless network configuration, bringing the network up successfully. From this point on, things basically worked, except that it couldn’t find the disk to install on, as documented above. I had to tell it my network was “WPA/WPA2 PSK”, as most are these days, rather than “WEP/Open Network”, the poorly-chosen default.
At this point I’m stuck, as mentioned above, because I can’t get Linux to see the disk I want it to install on.
I did manage to get Mate running (from a different Debian live image), but the touchpad mouse doesn’t work and the display only supports a resolution of 800×600, which is 23% of its native resolution of 1920×1080 and also blurry and smushed. Alt-F1 brings up the main menu despite the touchpad not working.