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Models covered
ASUS Vivobook E200HA

https://www.asus.com/Notebooks/ASUS-Vivobook-E200HA

The laptop is slow, however it can be useful for a terminal work with light desktop environment such as XFCE or openbox. The battery life is good. E.g using just terminal in openbox and ssh to remote machine can last for more than 10 hours.

Unfortunately Intel doesn't support Linux on Cherry Trail Atom SOCs, so this laptop has problems with suspension, but you can configure a "pseudo-suspension" that consumes little power, as explained below). Audio problems has been resolved and audio works with Debian 12 (Bookworm).

Most problems can be remediated, but if you're looking to a buy machine like this you should purchase one with a Celeron (or supported AMD equivalent) instead.

Overall Status

Legend :
= OK ; Unsupported(No Driver) ; = Error (Couldn't get it working); [?] Unknown, Not Test ; [-] Not-applicable
= Configuration Required; = Only works with a non-free driver and or firmware

Important Note

You may need to disable Secure Boot on UEFI/BIOS. To enter in BIOS press and release F2.

Debian stretch (or newer) is needed. It is recommended to use unofficial non-free images including firmware.

Configuration

Keyboard

This shouldn't be necessary, but if your keyboard layout isn't correctly loaded run setxkbmap pt (adapt to your keyboard layout) and add it to ~/.profile to execute it at every login.

Storage

Install Debian with discard and noatime options for every partition, as E200HA's storage is eMMC flash memory. This will help prolonging its lifespan.

If you miss this during installation, you can do it later by editing /etc/fstab and adding discard,noatime every fourth column.

E.g. for the root partition right before errors=remount-ro 0, so that it looks like discard,noatime,errors=remount-ro 0.

WiFi

If you used unofficial non-free images including firmware, the WiFi should work.

If not, download the package firmware-atheros (version 20160824-1 or newer) in another machine and install it via dpkg, as this is the only means of networking of this laptop. The WiFi card is a Qualcomm Atheros QCA9377.

You need to address this before installing any packages, such as those mentioned in the sections below.

Display

To control the display brightness you can install the package xbacklight and adjust it like xbacklight -set 50. The brightness should be memorized, if not add it to ~/.profile to execute it at every login.

If running this command fails with No outputs have backlight property, edit /etc/X11/xorg.conf and add this:

Section "Device"
    Identifier  "Card0"
    Driver      "intel"
    Option      "Backlight"  "intel_backlight"
EndSection

Power Management

Not working, see Bug#833009.

Unfortunately suspend doesn't work on Linux on Cherry Trail.

You can disable accidental suspend commands via:

sudo systemctl mask sleep.target suspend.target hibernate.target hybrid-sleep.target

You can also make it not attempt to suspend when closing the lid by adding this to /etc/systemd/logind.conf:

[Login]
HandleLidSwitch=ignore
HandleLidSwitchDocked=ignore

This will consume very little power when you close the lid (and it should lock the screen).

More details: https://wiki.debian.org/Suspend

If you get Gave up waiting for suspend/resume device during boot, add noresume to your kernel boot parameters in /etc/default/grub (don't forget to update-grub), so that it looks like:

GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="quiet noresume"

Audio

Audio works.

Mouse

The touchpad should work.

To enable tapping, add this to /etc/X11/xorg.conf.d/synaptics.conf:

Section "InputClass"
        Identifier      "Elan Touchpad"
        Driver          "libinput"
        Option          "Tapping"            "on"
EndSection

MicroSD Card Reader

The MicroSD card reader doesn't work (reliably).

Kernels 4.7.1 and 4.7.2 sometimes work, but sometimes they freeze. Kernels 4.7.3-4.7.10 freeze when inserting a card. Kernels 4.8 and 4.9 don't detect them and kernel 4.6.7 doesn't seem to work either.

Note: this was actually tested with Ubuntu prebuilt kernels on a Xubuntu 16.04 system.

Optimizations

It is recommended to install packages such as tlp and thermald, to help saving battery power.

You can compress the RAM to help save a little using zram-config (not avaliable in Debian, but the Ubuntu package works). Download zram-config_0.5_all.deb from Ubuntu and install it via sudo dpkg -i zram-config_0.5_all.deb.

System Summary

lspci

00:00.0 Host bridge [0600]: Intel Corporation Braswell SoC Transaction Router [8086:2280] (rev 22)
00:02.0 VGA compatible controller [0300]: Intel Corporation Braswell PCI Configuration Registers [8086:22b0] (rev 22)
00:0b.0 Signal processing controller [1180]: Intel Corporation Braswell P-Unit Power Management [8086:22dc] (rev 22)
00:14.0 USB controller [0c03]: Intel Corporation Braswell USB xHCI Host Controller [8086:22b5] (rev 22)
00:1a.0 Encryption controller [1080]: Intel Corporation Braswell Trusted Execution Engine Interface [8086:2298] (rev 22)
00:1c.0 PCI bridge [0604]: Intel Corporation Braswell PCIe Port 1 [8086:22c8] (rev 22)
00:1f.0 ISA bridge [0601]: Intel Corporation Braswell Platform Controller Unit LPC [8086:229c] (rev 22)
01:00.0 Network controller [0280]: Qualcomm Atheros QCA9377 802.11ac Wireless Network Adapter [168c:0042] (rev 30)

lsusb

lsusb -v | grep -E '\<(Bus|iProduct|bDeviceClass|bDeviceProtocol)' 2>/dev/null

Bus 002 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0003 Linux Foundation 3.0 root hub
  bDeviceClass            9 Hub
  bDeviceProtocol         3 
  iProduct                2 xHCI Host Controller
Bus 001 Device 004: ID 046d:c001 Logitech, Inc. N48/M-BB48/M-UK96A [FirstMouse Plus]
  bDeviceClass            0 (Defined at Interface level)
  bDeviceProtocol         0 
  iProduct                2 USB Mouse
      (Bus Powered)
  (Bus Powered)
Bus 001 Device 003: ID 13d3:3496 IMC Networks 
  bDeviceClass          224 Wireless
  bDeviceProtocol         1 Bluetooth
  iProduct                0 
Bus 001 Device 002: ID 0bda:57ed Realtek Semiconductor Corp. 
  bDeviceClass          239 Miscellaneous Device
  bDeviceProtocol         1 Interface Association
  iProduct                1 USB2.0 VGA UVC WebCam
      (Bus Powered)
  bDeviceClass          239 Miscellaneous Device
  bDeviceProtocol         1 Interface Association
  (Bus Powered)
Bus 001 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0002 Linux Foundation 2.0 root hub
  bDeviceClass            9 Hub
  bDeviceProtocol         1 Single TT
  iProduct                2 xHCI Host Controller

USB Host controllers entries (without OHCI, UHCI, EHCI) are removed too.

Resources

Attachments

Some configuration files and sample outputs.

Useful Links

Bug#832925

Credits