[GTALUG] war story: I fixed a tablet

[Michael Hill]

On Thu, Apr 14, 2016 at 12:33 AM, D. Hugh Redelmeier <hugh at mimosa.com>
wrote:

Soon I can try debian 8.4.0 multiarch on this 32-bit UEFI machine.
>

Have you tried this yet, Hugh?

Here's my experience with the upgrade (I was running 32-bit Fedora, aka
Fedlet). The wiki page is pretty good:

https://wiki.debian.org/InstallingDebianOn/Asus/T100TA

...particularly the grub command line switch for the cstates issue. I'm not
sure how the TAF hardware differs.

Step 2: I used the jessie netinst iso recommended by Lennart last month.
This served to remind me I should have read ahead to the wifi section and
prepared media containing the firmware (Step 1).

Rather than go back to Step 1, I tried the non-free firmware netinst iso,
but couldn't locate /sys/firmware/efi/efivars, with or without mounting.

Rather than solve the wifi issue, I switched to the stretch multi-arch DVD
iso, but it got stuck installing the core packages at around 39% *every*
time. It reminded me of one of the 4.x kernels I built on Fedora that was
incompatible with running the OS on the eMMC (system) drive.

Finally I succeeded in completing the installation using the jessie
multi-arch DVD iso (3.16 kernel). After some messing around doing things I
forgot to write down, I got a running Cinnamon desktop (I wanted GNOME but
couldn't get it off the USB stick).

I located and installed the wifi firmware according to the wiki page
instructions and connected using wpa_supplicant. I started upgrading to
stretch and GNOME, but the wifi connection would crap out every few dozen
megabytes. After many hours, it finished, and I had GNOME 3.20 (something I
never achieved on the Fedora install). I then...

- switched to NetworkManager, re-installed the wifi firmware (the latter
seemed to fix the issue of the connection cutting out)

- installed non-free firmware for intel-sound and atheros (ath3k) for my
Bluetooth dongle

- installed the t100_B.state file and used Vinod Koul's settings from
http://mailman.alsa-project.org/pipermail/alsa-devel/2015-June/094080.html
for working audio (keep the volume down for testing)

- enabled and started ModemManager *and* installed the
mobile-broadband-provider-info package to tether my phone

- started compiling the 4.6-rc7 kernel with the patches from the ASUS T100
Ubuntu Google+ community effort (
https://plus.google.com/u/0/communities/117853703024346186936)... it's just
wrapping up after 25+ hours. The stretch kernel (4.5.0) and the G+ Ubuntu
kernels (4.4.8.2 and 4.4.9.1) all boot, but the machine hangs with the
jessie kernel (3.16) as soon as it hits the display manager.

Current issue: Bluetooth. I haven't tried tackling the internal Bluetooth
yet, but my ath3k Bluetooth dongle worked on 32-bit Fedora. On 64-bit
Debian it is recognized and connects, but the connection is dropped right
away. The new kernel has a patch.

Corrections and suggestions welcome.

Mike
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