[Windows 8 Development and Hacking] Jhong2:
Yeah, I realise that; I always use separate /boot anyway (and am doing so on my t100)... it makes management much easier...

On second thoughts, it should work well enough if the SD card is brought up in the initrd image so that root can be mounted. If you install from the LiveCD installer, I guess it will be smart enough to include the module (and if not, you can probably rectify it).

The reason I say this is because someone corresponded with me by PM saying that the SD card was unavailable for partitioning when booting directly to the install option on a Lenovo Miix 2; so for whatever reason the initrd on the LiveCD doesn't bring up the adapter if that report is true. I haven't tried myself (I'm only interested in Ubuntu on the fast stuff), so it may just work.

---------- Post added at 09:23 AM ---------- Previous post was at 08:25 AM ----------

I'm making some more progress on the usability of the Ubuntu install.

Wifi has still been spotty -- I guess others have the same problem; the driver works inconsistently. I have a feeling that the nvram is dummy code to pass certification, and the windows driver is uploading it's own values anyway. I found an alternate nvram from the same chip used on the Wandaboard, and it works better. I've spliced the two nvrams together and I'm getting much better quality signals. Will post if it holds up.

Just finished compiling the 3.14-rc3 kernel, will be testing tonight. I'm hoping there will be some progress on sound.

For bluetooth, I think android also has the appropriate .hcd which can be installed with bcm_fw_cutter, but I haven't looked into this more closely yet.

If anyone has opened their machine, can they track down the orientation/accelerometer chip? Nothing seems to be populated by IIO, so it would be good to get a lead on it.

UPDATE

Updated to v3.14-rc3, more stable but no significant hardware improvement.

The following kernel options are still needed to boot and ensure rebooting works:

video=VGA-1:1366x768e reboot=p,f

Looking at linux-next, baytrail bluetooth & gps support is in (going to try it soon), Intel is adding an SST sound driver (it's temporarily disabled as it prevents compilation, but it looks promising), and the low power subsystem driver should recognize the hardware PWMs. All these patches were literally added in the last 3 days. Kernel 3.15 should be good to us.

On the battery, hardware IDs for the battery, etc seem to have been added, but then were subsequently removed from the pinctrl driver for 3.14 as the change was causing crashes. I haven't seen any follow-up since then. However a whole bunch of changes to the pinctrl driver seem to be going through right now, so I will try adding the IDs back when compiling linux-next and see if we can't get the pinctrl module up.

(I originally added links, etc. here, but my post was being blocked).

On the UI front, Unity is actually quite lovely for touch, with the launcher autohiding. Default gestures are sensible (4-finger swipe to reveal launcher), and there's a "click to drag" plugin for Firefox that makes it work well with touch.

I've added a udev rule to automatically enable the on-screen keyboard for text input when the base station is undocked. Ubuntu's built-in keyboard ("Onboard") is highly customisable and looks great with a bit of transparency. I'll post the udev scripts on my blog soon.

If you have an HDD in your base station, you'll want to set spindown_time to 5 mins or less in hdparm.conf. You really don't want to pull the base station off with it spinning; it doesn't make nice noises.

I had the code and links for all this, but this post isn't going through with it. I'll make a blog post with all the necessary steps once I've got (hopefully) battery and power management in decent shape.

Ubuntu is really nice on this. I can't wait to remove Windows once all the above is resolved.