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How to setup Asus 1215N under Debian 6.0 Linux

Hardware	Status under Linux	Notes
Atom D525, 1.8 GHz, dual core	works
2 GB DDR3, single channel	works
Western Digital hard disk	works	disk permanently spins down and ignores all hdparm commands except disabling APM completely, this is what I did to solve the problem
Display, 1366x768	works
Touchpad	works
Broadcom BCM4313 WLAN chip	works	I use the brcm80211 driver.
Atheros AR8152 LAN chip	works	I use the atl1c driver.
USB 2.0 controller (3 ports)	works
VGA port	works
HDMI port	?	didn't test
Intel GMA 3150 graphics	works
nVidia Optimus technology	?	no support under Linux; you can disable Optimus manually which gives you at least 1 hour more running time
nVidia ION 2 chip (512 MB DDR3)	?	didn't test (doesn't work according to Gentoo wiki)
Intel HD audio chip	works
Card reader (SD, MMC)	?	didn't test
Bluetooth 3.0	works
Webcam, 640x480	works	tested with Cheese

In February 2011, I got my new notebook, a 12.1" Asus 1215N. I chose this one because of its low weight and its (currently) superior hardware. When I tried to setup Debian, I had to solve some problems (I don't have much experience with Linux on notebooks). I finally managed the task using some information from the web.

There are certainly several ways to achieve the goal of installing Debian on the 1215N. Here, I will just portray how I did it. I used Debian 6.0 (Squeeze).

This file is a work in progress. It is not complete yet. At the end of the file, I list some problems I encountered with the 1215N and the solutions I figured out.

Setup without Linux and internet connection

Many tutorials on the web assume that you already have a Linux machine up and running. When it comes to the driver installation, it is assumed that you have a working internet connection on your notebook. In my case, both assumptions were not the case. I used a Windows machine to download all necessary files and transferred them via a USB stick onto the Asus.

Installation

This is the first difficulty. You cannot just make a bootable USB stick from the Debian standard installer (the ISO image) and use it for installation. The installer will boot but ask for a CDROM, which of course is not present --- at least if you don't own an external optical drive. I don't, but I own an external hard drive, and I used it for the installation. If you don't own an external hard drive, you probably have to use the netinst installer image instead of the files I used.

I downloaded the file boot.img.gz and extracted it. This is a small (24 MB) installer image for AMD64 Debian Squeeze. All my instructions are related to AMD64.
I downloaded the program dd.
I downloaded the ISO image of the first Debian Squeeze installation CD, available here. I chose the Xfce version of the images.
I used dd to prepare a bootable USB stick using the command dd if=boot.img of=\\.\X:, with X the drive letter of your USB stick. Under no circumstances make a mistake with the arguments of dd. It can destroy all data on your hard drive.
I copied the ISO image onto a FAT32 partition on my external hard drive. In my case, I first had to create a FAT32 partition using the Windows system program diskpart. (This is very dangerous, a single mistake can destroy all your data.) Maybe this wasn't necessary, but I didn't know if the Debian installer can read NTFS partitions.
I started the 1215N and went into the BIOS (via pressing F2 during startup). In the BIOS, I changed the boot order so that USB devices are checked first.
I plugged in the external hard drive and booted the 1215N using the USB stick. Then, I followed the instructions. The installer automatically found the ISO image on the external hard drive and installed Debian from there. When the partitioner was executed, I chose the pre-configured Windows data partition as my Linux system partition. Be careful not to use the Windows system partition or the hidden system recovery partition. (Unless you know exactly what you're doing.) I didn't choose any swap partition (swap partitions are not necessary with modern Linux kernels). When asked, I said that I wanted to install the laptop tools.

Now, the basic installation is complete. The next step is to install some important packages without you won't get any further.

Setup of LAN and WLAN

I mounted the ISO image as CDROM (via a command like mount -o loop your-iso-image-name /media/cdrom).
Using aptitude, I installed Xfce, several admin programs (like sudo) and the package build-essential.
Check if you have the package wireless-tools installed. If not, install it.
Using the Windows machine, I downloaded compat-wireless-2.6.tar.bz2, which contains the LAN driver (for the Atheros chip).
I downloaded the package firmware-brcm80211. It contains the WLAN driver (for the Broadcom 4313 chip).
I had to compile the LAN driver myself. For this, I unzipped the compat-wireless file and typed make within its directory. The build process takes a while. One can speed it up by pre-selecting the LAN driver (atl1c) using the command scripts/driver-select atl1c before executing make. Then, I typed sudo make install, sudo make unload, sudo make wlunload, sudo make btunload, sudo modprobe atl1c.
I installed the Broadcom wireless driver using sudo dpkg -i firmware...all.deb.

The sound chip works out-of-the-box. As wireless manager, I use wicd and the wicd Network Manager, contained in the Debian ISO image. You may probably want to use another network manager, especially if you don't use Xfce. UPDATE: I now use NetworkManager instead of wicd. This is because NetworkManager supports mobile broadband connections. This required to use kernel 2.6.39, since 38 and 3.0 didn't work (system freeze). Since kernel 3.1, there are no problems anymore (and the Broadcom WLAN driver can handle weak connections much better, but still not as good as the Windows driver).

Tips

Do not disable the WLAN chip. I tried this, and as soon as the network manager wanted to scan the network, the system froze to death. Then, each time I rebooted the machine, Debian hung while starting wicd. You'll have to activate the chip again in the BIOS (or under Windows which won't crash). UPDATE: I don't know if this problem still persists with the current kernel and drivers.
Disable the power management of the Western Digital WD3200BEVT hard disk. I experienced a permanent spin down of the disk (you can hear this, it makes a clicking noise). Everytime I wanted to save a document or open a dialog, I had to wait several seconds until the hard disk was ready to work. This shortens the lifespan of the drive and is extremely annoying. Finally, I figured out that only completely disabling power management using the command sudo hdparm -B255 your-drive-name helps. (I modified /etc/hdparm.conf so that the change is not forgotten at reboot.) Beforehand, I had made a BIOS update using Windows and ASUS Update (the original version in the machine is outdated) and changed the disk mode from AHCI to IDE, so I don't know if hdparm alone suffices to solve the problem or if the BIOS update is also necessary.
Be careful with kernel updates. In general, they work fine, but when I installed a regular update from 3.1.6 to 3.1.8, suddenly hdparm could not speak to the hard disk any more (I noticed this because of the familiar "clicking" sound). I had to change the drive name from /dev/disk/by-label/main to /dev/sda in order to get it to work again. I find this strange, because the main label still exists.
At first, the 1215N didn't produce any sound under Debian. This was because the speaker volume was set to zero in the mixer.
The BIOS version is outdated. I updated it using ASUS Update under Windows.
If you don't disable the Optimus chipset manually, you will only get a battery runtime of 4-5 hours or so under Linux.

User experience

I use Debian Testing (kernel 3.2 from the official repo) together with Xfce 4.8. The RAM usage is very moderate: immediately after startup, with NetworkManager and some panel applets loaded, the system consumes less than 128 MB memory. The software I use most of the time is gedit, Opera, LibreOffice, Pidgin, Terminal, and GCC. I also use Iceweasel, Eclipse, Netbeans, GIMP, Inkscape, VLC, Audacity, Hydrogen, FileZilla, Nemiver, and some other programs. All works smoothly, even watching full screen Flash videos (depending on the player). Also games are possible with integrated graphics: Bos Wars, Extreme Tux Racer, OpenArena, and OpenTTD work fine, only SuperTuxKart has a low frame rate (which probably is the fault of SuperTuxKart). Since kernel 3.1, the system is completely stable (before, the WLAN driver could cause kernel panics in certain avoidable situations).

last modified: Tue 23 Oct 2012 15:18:36 CEST