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#1 2015-10-01 20:51:34

ratdude747
Member
From: Madison, IN
Registered: 2013-07-05
Posts: 42

Insignia NS-15MS0832 (Intel Bay Trail) UEFI woes

I bought an Insignia NS-15MS0832 in hopes of arching it up. So far, this has been fruitless. This is an intel bay trail tablet, which means it has a 32 bit UEFI. FWIW my cpu is an atom Z3735F.
What I've done:

-installed arch to a USB stick (not the .iso, as in a normal install); I partitioned it in GPT, 512mb efi partition (even made sure it was that type in cgdisk!) formatted in vfat and mounted to /boot, installed grub in efi-i386 mode. the UEFI menu sees the stick but when I boot bypass to it it fails (comes back to the UEFI screen). The tablet had secure boot disabled from the factory too.

-re-installed grub (uefi-i386) from another usb stick (dd'd iso this time) on a laptop booted in UEFI mode. No dice.

I'm trying out fedlet now, which is fedora made for the bay trail platform. I'll report if I can at least get that to boot. In the mean time, am I taking the right approach to making a USB stick I can boot off of and then use to internal storage?

Edit- fedlet boots w/o issue. What gives?

When arch-chrooted, I am installing with this command

grub-install --target=i386-efi --efi-directory=/boot --bootloader-id=grub --boot-directory=$esp --recheck --debug

.

I also copied the two .efi stubs to /boot/efi/boot/.

Last edited by ratdude747 (2015-10-01 20:56:28)

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#2 2015-10-01 21:32:28

ratdude747
Member
From: Madison, IN
Registered: 2013-07-05
Posts: 42

Re: Insignia NS-15MS0832 (Intel Bay Trail) UEFI woes

I'm trying to follow the instructions here:

https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Un … Using_GRUB

But it's having me modify files on the disk, which isn't working because the file system is read only.

Workaround?

Edit- I'm trying said technique by way of the first USB stick redone.

Last edited by ratdude747 (2015-10-01 21:38:07)

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#3 2015-10-02 02:00:28

ratdude747
Member
From: Madison, IN
Registered: 2013-07-05
Posts: 42

Re: Insignia NS-15MS0832 (Intel Bay Trail) UEFI woes

This is getting strange... I was able to get the grub shell by tossing the grub EFI stub into /EFI/boot on a plain (not EFI) partition formatted in FAT32. MBR at that too.

Apparently this tablet doesn't like true EFI partitions. Well...

Looks like I get to rebuild the flash drive yet again, this time with the boot partition regualr (the linux type). I'll post with my results.

Last edited by ratdude747 (2015-10-02 02:12:32)

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#4 2015-10-02 02:50:37

ratdude747
Member
From: Madison, IN
Registered: 2013-07-05
Posts: 42

Re: Insignia NS-15MS0832 (Intel Bay Trail) UEFI woes

FIXED!

Redid the install, with an FAT32 (type: linux, NOT EFI) /boot partiton. I did need to copy the grubia32.efi file to /EFI/boot/bootia32.efi to make it work. Alas, I now have a bootable USB drive (and I now know what needs to happen in order to make the real install work).

Last edited by ratdude747 (2015-10-02 18:34:45)

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#5 2015-10-02 03:44:11

ratdude747
Member
From: Madison, IN
Registered: 2013-07-05
Posts: 42

Re: Insignia NS-15MS0832 (Intel Bay Trail) UEFI woes

All for nothing... due to bad driver issues (The realtek RTL8723 SDIO wifi chip mainly) has kinda nerfed any real point in continuing. While I did see drivers in the AUR, DKMS didn't like them (file not found, I ran the commands suggested during the install via pacman).

For now I'm cutting my losses by trying classic start (to at least get it to psuedo win 7)... but I really wanted to get arch (with gnome shell) running on it. Sure, I can use a USB wifi device... but as a long term solution, no.

(that said, if you know of a way to get said wifi chip running, I'm all ears).

edit- saw this:

https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/linux-baytrail/

giving that a try... as I hear that plus the AUR driver works. Hopefully.

Last edited by ratdude747 (2015-10-02 04:00:05)

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#6 2015-10-03 00:11:01

ratdude747
Member
From: Madison, IN
Registered: 2013-07-05
Posts: 42

Re: Insignia NS-15MS0832 (Intel Bay Trail) UEFI woes

Good news:

I used said kernel from the AUR (built it on my laptop as I can't run from USB and charge at the same time), and... the wifi driver (also from the AUR) worked but gave firmware errors.

The issue/ workaround: the firmware files in the usr/src/rtl8723bs-2 (the four .bin files) need to be copied to /usr/bin/firmware/rtlwifi and for some reason that wasn't happening. looking in the makefile, it looks to be all good... either way, manually copying the files seems to have worked.

I'm not 100% sure if WPA2 is good (wouldn't connect, may have been me fatfingering the key) but it does see networks and it seems to have connected up to an unsecured network without issues. If that's a go, then I may go ahead and nuke W8 (which is bugging out to the point of needing a hard re-install anyway) and try getting a GUI (gnome 3 preferred) to run.

It's a long challenge, but it's getting there.

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#7 2015-10-03 03:25:16

ratdude747
Member
From: Madison, IN
Registered: 2013-07-05
Posts: 42

Re: Insignia NS-15MS0832 (Intel Bay Trail) UEFI woes

Wireless works... but my gosh it is SLOW. Pacman is reporting a DL rate of less than 10K/s... while I can easily get over 10 times that on a laptop running the same mirrorlist and sitting right next to it.

iwconfig reports a speed of 72.2M/s... and (dubiously) 100/100 quality.

Bad driver? I've read that some are better than others... I'll keep looking into it, does anybody have experience with the realtek 8723 series?

Also, could the issue be that it runs over SDIO; is there a known issue/fix regarding such?

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#8 2015-10-03 04:09:47

ratdude747
Member
From: Madison, IN
Registered: 2013-07-05
Posts: 42

Re: Insignia NS-15MS0832 (Intel Bay Trail) UEFI woes

I tried various module reloading based "fixes" I saw on ubuntu forums, and one of them seems to have helped a bit; reloading the r8723bs module with ips=0 seems to have gotten me in the 100kbs range. Better, but still pretty crap. Edit- it was a short bit of luck, it's being slow again (and no I didn't reboot; the module is still loaded with ips=0)

Any suggestions? Anybody?

Last edited by ratdude747 (2015-10-03 04:10:51)

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#9 2017-01-04 18:46:24

thinkmac
Member
From: Houston, TX
Registered: 2013-04-11
Posts: 1

Re: Insignia NS-15MS0832 (Intel Bay Trail) UEFI woes

Woah! You are like one man army in this thread. Did you ever get it work fully to your liking? I also have the same tablet, and have been thinking about putting Arch on it. It is running Windows 10 at the moment, but I am not sure if it is worth the pain and hassle to battle through driver or even Wi-Fi speed.

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#10 2017-01-05 21:31:03

Pineman13
Member
Registered: 2016-12-04
Posts: 26

Re: Insignia NS-15MS0832 (Intel Bay Trail) UEFI woes

I have a different platform: it's a laptop, some ultra-budget trash.
But I have similar hardware: Bay Trail Intel Atom Z3735F and r8723bs-powered wireless.
And I have to say - the driver is still garbage. Hasn't seen much change lately.
Right now about to try that custom kernel

Will write back about the status of my struggles.

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