[Asus Transformer TF700] gardiol:
I think you got a "small" detail lost here...

This is about the Asus Transformer Infinity, TF700T (and known to work also on the TF300T at very least), which is an ARM based tablet, not an Atom or x86 at all architecture. It's based on the proprietary NVIDIA Tegra3 platform with 1.6ghz quad-core ARM CPU and 1gb RAM.

Set this aside, i am going to reply t your questions as well (but they might not be relevant anymore):

> How well is the boot loader working ? Any known issues, esp. ones that brick the device ?

Perfectly. It works flawlessly, due to the same principle behind it. You boot a kernel, then you kexec to the "other" kernel, de-facto rebooting into a different root.

there might be some brick risk the first time you setup the first kernel, but the "lifeline" project mentioned in the first page let's you get out of any brick situation i can think of.

> Will the boot loader will load any kernel from any distribution ? Are there limitations ?

It will load any kernel you give to it. Whether that kernel will actually boot the tablet hardware, this is another matter. Basically you are stuck to a few working kernels all based on the latest Asus-provided 3.1.10 kernel and heavily modded by some great guys here to backport very nice stuff like F2FS and ZRAM. I tried myself to build a new kernel (i wanted to try the open-source OpenTegra drivers) but with no luck due to the huge amount of custom patches used by Asus in its kernel.

So, no, it will only boot basically one specific kernel (of which you have the full sources so you are free to play with it).

The good thing here is that this kernel will work on mostly any linux distribution you want.

> Are there any side effects to removing Android entirely from the machine ?

Absolutely not! But there is no much need to remove it, you will not be able to repartition the internal memory anyway, it's proprietary. Just use the data partition and ignore the Android ones, which are smallish anyway.

ps: NEVER booter Android again after i got Gentoo Linux going.

> When the thread says that ext3 is supported, by extension of that, is ext4 supported ?

willy@tf700t ~ $ cat /proc/filesystems
nodev sysfs
nodev rootfs
nodev bdev
nodev proc
nodev cgroup
nodev tmpfs
nodev devtmpfs
nodev debugfs
nodev sockfs
nodev usbfs
nodev pipefs
nodev anon_inodefs
nodev rpc_pipefs
nodev devpts
ext3
ext2
ext4
nodev ramfs
vfat
iso9660
nodev nfs
nodev nfs4
nodev cifs
ntfs
nodev autofs
nodev fuse
fuseblk
nodev fusectl
udf
f2fs
nodev mqueue
nodev oprofilefs

> The TF700 uses an atom processor. Does that mean that stock x64 kernels/rpms run on it ? There aren't any gotchas somewhere that require special kernel settings ?

No, it uses an ARM processor with NEON extensions. No stock distribution works on it, you need an ARM distribution. Good news is, at least Ubuntu/Lubuntu as well as Gentoo (see my install wiki) works great and i guess most of the others should too.

... CAVEAT: since the hardware is proprietary, the X will not boot until you install and configure manually the NVIDIA provided binary drivers, for which to my knowledge there is no RPM/DEB just a tar. As a side issue, the drivers are OLD and only support reliably up to Xorg version 12 and 13, so your distribution MUST be able to downgrade X to version 12 (version 13 has very serious security flaws and it's been removed on most distributions, the driver for 14 is not very stable).

> I'm a Fedora guy. Don't shoot me. Has anyone loaded Fedora 21 on their device ? How do you like it ?

Have no idea, just using Gentoo and loving it. Just make sure a supported Xorg is available.

>How well/fast does Linux run on these devices ?

Faster than Android... but given that you install a lightweight environment (i use LXDE), activate ZRAM (gives you 50% more ram more or less), and harness the full power of Linux over the limited Android stuff.

Oh, yes, and i am using a blazing fast microSD card instead of the internal crappy memory, so this helps a lot too!

> I've been disappointed with Android on my TF700 since day 1. Laggy, buggy, crashes, etc.

Me too here.

> I love the TF700 hardware. The screen is outstanding. The device is a nice size, etc. I love Linux. How well does it work on this device ?

Overall, for my needs much better than Android. GIMP works good, Chromium is fast (Firefox is unusable due bugs and DPI issues), LibreOffice works good, Battle of Wesnoth is great, Freeciv works, wireshark and nmap works, QtCreator too, so i am using it also as a development box. And also much more stuff. Some of it you have to adapt a bit, and i guess a Gentoo is much better than Ubuntu where you are stuck with what is available for ARM.

Ah, and linux really does not play well with high-DPI screens. Some apps will really NOT work due to microscopic buttons or too-oversized icons. Most of them do work, tough, and Chromium is one of the best players here, it even support the touchscreen enabling some nice gestures.

> What peripherals on the TF700 are and aren't supported ? Can screen brightness, including turning IPS+ on and off be controlled ?

As hardware goes, i still have not found a way to use GPS and webcam, but i guess it's a matter of interest to set them up.

And 3D acceleration is basically a no-go, since it does accelerate ONLY EGL stuff and basically all Linux 3D is OpenGL. If you find any EGL software for linux, then it should be accelerated i guess. Never found one.

Bluetooth works (bluez4 only, any distribution which uses bluez5 will not work), WiFi works rock-solid, USB port, keyboard and SD slot (on the dock) works...

Brightness and screen lock works (with some manual fiddling, not out of the box). Never tried the IPS+ thing but i guess it's a matter of playing with files under /sys/something.

Battery status can be read (but not ACPI compliant), CPU speed/governor works normally.

Suspend to ram and suspend to disk does NOT work, forget about it, it's inherently broken in the kernel drivers... i either turn the tablet off or just lock the screen.

The touchscreen... it works great, multi-touch and all, just Linux does not play well with, no gestures out of the box... no kinetik scroll or pinch-zoom unless one software does support it directly (Chromium is the ONLY one i found so far). Try scroll LibreOffice document by tapping your finger on a really small scroll bar :) Yes you can work around most of these issues with theming and such, just needs time and patience.

Hope this helps!

(EDIT: some fixes here and there, some more details on hardware not working)