Translation(s): none

DebianOn is an effort to document how to install, configure and use Debian on some specific hardware. Therefore potential buyers would know if that hardware is supported and owners would know how get the best out of that hardware.

The purpose is not to duplicate the Debian Official Documentation, but to document how to install Debian on some specific hardware.

If you need help to get Debian running on your hardware, please have a look at our user support channels where you may find specific channels (mailing list, IRC channel) dedicated to certain types of hardware.

Models covered

ASUS Transformer Book T100TA-DK002DH

T100TAM-BING-DK016B

CPU:

Intel Atom Bay Trail Z3740 (BYT-T)/BGA

Intel Atom Bay Trail Z3775 (BGA)

Video card:

Intel HD Graphics (Atom Processor Z36xxx/Z37xxx Series Graphics & Display)

Screen:

10.1" HD SLIM WV (GL, LED-TP)

Disks:

eMMC 32 GB (/dev/mmcblk0)
flash disk 7.5GB (/dev/sda, hidden, Windows recovery)

eMMC 64GB (/dev/mmcblk0)

RAM:

LPDDR3 1067 2GB (on-board)

Wireless card:

Broadcom 43241b4 SDIO

Bluetooth:

Broadcom (on-board BCM2035 HCI?)

Overall Status in Debian 10 "Buster"

Core Components

photo.jpg

Boot Standard Kernel:

(./)

Detect hard drives:

(./)

CPU:

(./) <!>

Power Management

Shutdown

(./)

Reboot

(./)

Hibernation

{o}

Suspend

(./) {i}

Battery monitor

(./)

Screen backlight

(./) {i}

Display Server

Xorg

(./)

- OpenGL

(./)

- Resize and Rotate (randr)

(./) {i}

Wayland

(./)

- Resize and Rotate (randr)

{o}

Built-in/Internal Devices

Keyboard's Hotkeys

(./)

Touchpad

(./)

Touchscreen

(./)

Wifi

(./) {i} X-(

Bluetooth

{o} X-(

Sound

(./) X-(

MicroSD card reader

(./)

Built-in camera

{X}

Light sensor

{X}

Accelerometer + Gyro

(./)

Magnetomiter

{o}

Legend:

(./)

OK

{i}

Configuration required

<!>

Affected by bugs

X-(

Requires non-free driver and or firmware

/!\

Error (Couldn't get it working)

{o}

Not tested or partially tested

{X}

Unsupported (no driver)

[-]

Not applicable


Important Notes

The information and procedures contained in this page are mostly for the T100TA model, they might not apply to different models. See also Asus X205TA as it has a similar hardware.

Non-working hardware and possible issues - November 2020

  • The Intel Bay Trail CPU suffered of occasional freeze with older kernels, should the problem still occur refer to Kernel.org bug #109051;

  • The screen backlight cannot be adjusted without recompiling the kernel, see Debian bug #971953;

  • The system supports only the s2idle suspend mode (see The Linux Kernel - System Sleep States); if the screen backlight cannot be adjusted the screen will remain turned on and blank; with a recompiled kernel (see point above) the screen will be correctly turned off and the battery consumption will be of the 2% per hour or less;

  • The system might not be able to hibernate (suspend-to-disk), going into a freeze state that can be recovered only with a hard shutdown;

  • The built-in camera Aptina MT9M114 does not work and it requires an up-to-date atomisp driver; see possibly related discussions Kernel.org bug #109821 and Linux Surface Issue #91;

  • The light sensor does not work.

Because of said issues, it might be a good idea to install newer kernels and firmwares from the Debian backports repositories, when available.

Things to know before installing Debian

  • The T100 is a mixed mode EFI system (i.e. a 64-bit CPU combined with a 32-bit EFI) already supported by the Debian Installer:
    • to install Debian 32-bit, use the Debian Installer for the i386 architecture;

    • to install Debian 64-bit, use the multiarch Debian Installer.

  • The WiFi card is difficult to configure from the Debian Installer environment, it is recommended to use a standard CD/DVD Debian Installer image (or use a supported WiFI USB dongle if the internet is really required during the installation);

  • Debian Buster supports Secure Boot, please check the Debian wiki page here and evaluate if disabling it or not;

  • If dual-booting with Windows, it is recommended to disable the Windows fast boot feature, see askubuntu - Why disable Fast Boot on Windows 8 when having dual booting?;

  • Because the CPU might suffer of the issue mentioned in the section above, it might be necessary to apply the fix described in the Power Management section already when launching the Debian Installer;


Configuration

Power Management

Intel Bay Trail CPU C-states issue

Devices with Intel Bay Trail CPUs have been affected by this bug which has been known to cause seemingly random freezes of the system. The bug has been reported to have been fixed, or at least mitigated, in Linux kernel version 5. Should random freezes still occur, the only work around which has been reported to work consistently is setting the intel_idle.max_cstate=1 kernel parameter which has the drawback of increasing power consumption considerably.

To temporary set this parameter at boot (e.g. when using the Debian installer or at the very first boot of the system), when in Grub press "e" after selecting the entry you want to boot and then add the parameter at the end of the "linux..." line.

To permanently set this parameter, add the file /etc/default/grub.d/intel-bay-trail-cstate-issue.cfg containing these lines:

# Prevent random freezes on Intel Bay Trail CPUs
# WARNING: increases power consumption considerably
# https://wiki.debian.org/InstallingDebianOn/PageFragmentIntelBayTrailCStateIssue
# https://bugzilla.kernel.org/show_bug.cgi?id=109051
GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX="$GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX intel_idle.max_cstate=1"

then update grub with:

$ sudo update-grub

Screen backlight control

As mentioned in the Important Notes section, the screen backlight cannot be adjusted without recompiling the kernel. For further details please refer to Debian bug #971953.

A (partial) workaround is to adjust the screen brightness using xrandr (provided by x11-xserver-utils), but it has not impact on the power consumption whatsoever (no battery saving):

$ man xrandr
[...]
--brightness brightness
    Multiply the gamma values on the crtc currently attached to the output to specified floating value.
    Useful for overly bright or overly dim outputs. However, this is a software only modification, if 
    your hardware has support to actually change the brightness, you will probably prefer to use xbacklight.

To manually change the brightness with xrandr do:

xrandr --output <OUTPUT> --brightness <VALUE>

where <OUTPUT> can be found with the command xrandr | grep -w connected | cut -d" " -f1, and <VALUE> can be a value between 0 and 1.

A script that makes use of this xrandr functionality is the brightness control script from the t100ta-utility-scripts.


Touchscreen

The touchscreen is identified as ATML1000:

$ xinput
⎡ Virtual core pointer                          id=2    [master pointer  (3)]
⎜   ↳ Virtual core XTEST pointer                id=4    [slave  pointer  (2)]
⎜   ↳ Asus TouchPad                             id=11   [slave  pointer  (2)]
⎜   ↳ ATML1000:00 03EB:8C0E                     id=13   [slave  pointer  (2)]
⎣ Virtual core keyboard                         id=3    [master keyboard (2)]
    ↳ Virtual core XTEST keyboard               id=5    [slave  keyboard (3)]
    ↳ Asus Wireless Radio Control               id=6    [slave  keyboard (3)]
    ↳ Video Bus                                 id=7    [slave  keyboard (3)]
    ↳ Sleep Button                              id=8    [slave  keyboard (3)]
    ↳ Asus Keyboard                             id=9    [slave  keyboard (3)]
    ↳ Asus Keyboard                             id=10   [slave  keyboard (3)]
    ↳ bytcr-rt5640 Headset                      id=12   [slave  keyboard (3)]
    ↳ Asus WMI hotkeys                          id=14   [slave  keyboard (3)]
    ↳ gpio-keys                                 id=15   [slave  keyboard (3)]

The integrated GPU Intel HD Graphics, Atom Processor Z36xxx/Z37xxx Series Graphics & Display works out of the box and it does not require the installation of the driver provided by xserver-xorg-video-intel.

Screen rotation

The ?InvenSense MPU6500 Accelerometer + Gyro works out of the box and the automatic screen rotation functionality should be provided by applications using iio-sensor-proxy, like in the GNOME desktop environment. If missing, such functionality can be provided with custom implementations, like the screen rotator script from the t100ta-utility-scripts.

Multi-touch

Multi-touch works out of the box. Pinch to zoom, rotation and long press for right-click work in applications that support such gestures and actions.

If the long press action is not recognised, the right-click can be emulated via two different solutions:

About the latter, the Windows button is the small physical button on the left side of the tablet (the bigger button right above is the volume button but it is not recognised by the system). Such button can be mapped to a command that emulates a right mouse button click. One way to do so is by using xdotool and xbindkeys (this should work only with X11, not with Wayland):

  1. Install xdotool and xbindkeys
  2. Create an initial configuration for xbindkeys with xbindkeys --defaults > ~/.xbindkeysrc

  3. Add the action to be mapped to the physical button
     cat << EOF >> ~/.xbindkeysrc
     # Emulate the right mouse button click with the physical Windows button.
     "xdotool click 3"
       m:0x0 + c:248
     EOF
  4. Reload the xbindkeys configuration file or restart you session.

The physical Windows button is represented by the code m:0x0 + c:248, check it but running the command xbindkeys -k and then pressing the button.

Screen offset issue

The following problem might occur with the Linux kernel 4.19 (from this post on Linux Mint forum):

Should you incur in this problem, try to to change the screen resolution and to revert it back , or to turn the screen off and on again using xrandr:

xrandr --output <OUTPUT> --off && xrandr --output <OUTPUT> --auto

As the problem might occur at every boot as described above, it could be useful to execute the previous command automatically before the login. This can be done by editing/creating a display setup script (if using a display manager such as SDDM, GDM, LightDM), or by creating a custom X session startup script, e.g.:

cat << EOF | sudo tee -a /etc/X11/Xsession.d/45custom-t100ta-reset-display
xrandr --output DSI-1 --off
xrandr --output DSI-1 --auto
EOF

Possible related bug: freedesktop.org - Bug 102929 - Kernel 4.13.1 breaks screen output


Audio

The audio device is an Intel SST Audio / Realtek RT5640, it requires the proprietary firmware firmware-intel-sound and an ALSA Use Case Manager (UCM) file that is provided by the package libasound2-data. Installing these two packages and restarting the machine should be enough to have the audio device working.


WiFi

The wifi device is a Broadcom 43241b1 on-board SDIO device, it requires the proprietary firmware firmware-brcm80211 and a nvram file.

The nvram file can be found under /sys/firmware/efi/efivars/. If the directory is empty, it has to be (temporarily) mounted first:

sudo mount -t efivarfs efivarfs /sys/firmware/efi/efivars

Inspect the syslog and check wich firmware the system tried to load:

sudo grep brcmfmac /var/log/syslog
# ...
brcmfmac_sdio mmc1:0001:1: firmware: failed to load brcm/brcmfmac43241b4-sdio.bin (-2)
# ...

(for the the T100TAL it should be brcm/brcmfmac43340-sdio).

Then save the nvram-file as a .txt file with the same firmware name just found:

# For the T100TA
sudo cp /sys/firmware/efi/efivars/nvram-74b00bd9-805a-4d61-b51f-43268123d113 /lib/firmware/brcm/brcmfmac43241b4-sdio.txt

# For the T100TAL
sudo cp /sys/firmware/efi/efivars/nvram-74b00bd9-805a-4d61-b51f-43268123d113 /lib/firmware/brcm/brcmfmac43340-sdio.txt

Note that nvram-file might contains a wrong MAC address, but it is not a problem as the file is only a template.

Reboot the system or reload the brcmfmac module:

sudo modprobe -r brcmfmac && sudo modprobe brcmfmac

WiFi instabilities

The wifi device suffers of instabilities, it might disconnect without being able to reconnect again. If it happens, reloading the brcmfmac kernel module might make it work again:

# modprobe -r brcmfmac && modprobe brcmfmac

if not, then a reboot of the machine is required.


System Summary

lspci

00:00.0 Host bridge [0600]: Intel Corporation Atom Processor Z36xxx/Z37xxx Series SoC Transaction Register [8086:0f00] (rev 09)
00:02.0 VGA compatible controller [0300]: Intel Corporation Atom Processor Z36xxx/Z37xxx Series Graphics & Display [8086:0f31] (rev 09)
00:14.0 USB controller [0c03]: Intel Corporation Atom Processor Z36xxx/Z37xxx, Celeron N2000 Series USB xHCI [8086:0f35] (rev 09)
00:1a.0 Encryption controller [1080]: Intel Corporation Atom Processor Z36xxx/Z37xxx Series Trusted Execution Engine [8086:0f18] (rev 09)
00:1f.0 ISA bridge [0601]: Intel Corporation Atom Processor Z36xxx/Z37xxx Series Power Control Unit [8086:0f1c] (rev 09)

lsusb

Bus 002 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0003 Linux Foundation 3.0 root hub
Bus 001 Device 003: ID 0b05:17e0 ASUSTek Computer, Inc. 
Bus 001 Device 002: ID 0b05:17e4 ASUSTek Computer, Inc. 
Bus 001 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0002 Linux Foundation 2.0 root hub

/sys/bus/iio/devices/

Sensors:

cat /sys/bus/iio/devices/iio:device1/name
INVN6500

cat /sys/bus/iio/devices/iio:device1/name
AK8963


Resources

Attachments

Some configuration files and sample outputs.

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