Installing Arch Linux on a Teclast X98 pro Cherry Trail tablet

kraghot · 2016-01-04 21:30:24

Hi everyone,
Recently I bought a tablet running on Intel Atom x5-Z8500 processor.
I've prepared a USB drive for installation and plugged it and a USB keyboard into a powered USB hub (apparently some tablets similar to this one have had problems with power to the USB port being cut, which is why I chose a powered hub).
I can go into the bios normally and it detects the USB drive and I can boot UEFI from it no problem.
The problems begin when I get to the menu where I can choose to boot Arch and other stuff: both USB devices turn off after pressing any key.
I always managed to get 1 keystroke in (not sure if it's because I was quick enough before the devices turn of or if it dies after one keystroke).
Anyway when I immediately pressed Enter it started booting, but complained it could not find ARCH_201601 drive, because it apparently disconnects. Also keyboard is unusable at that point.
So my question would be, what could be causing this? What could I try to resolve the problem?

Thanks to everyone in advance

Slithery · 2016-01-04 21:38:36

kraghot wrote:

I've prepared a USB drive for installation...

How?

kraghot · 2016-01-04 21:51:52

slithery wrote:

kraghot wrote:
I've prepared a USB drive for installation...
How?

I have used gnome's Image Writer to write the image on the USB. Should I try some other method?

ewaller · 2016-01-04 21:52:02

kraghot wrote:

I have used gnome's image writer to put the iso on the drive. Should I try other methods?

If you were wondering where your post went, you hit the report link, not the reply link

kraghot · 2016-01-04 21:54:06

ewaller wrote:

kraghot wrote:
I have used gnome's image writer to put the iso on the drive. Should I try other methods?
If you were wondering where your post went, you hit the report link, not the reply link

Oh my god , I am so sorry, I such an idiot

Slithery · 2016-01-04 21:55:59

Gnome's Image Writer should be fine, I was just checking you hadn't used Unetbootin or any other unsupported method.

ewaller · 2016-01-04 21:57:09

kraghot wrote:

I am so sorry

Don't be. If that is the worst thing that happens today, we are all doing alright.
It happens more than you might imagine

kraghot · 2016-01-04 22:00:15

I tried to boot my laptop using the drive just in case and it booted OK.
Could it be because of my keyboard which is a Logitech G710+, which is a backlit keyboard and now that I think about it this keyboard is known to cause trouble on smaller devices, however I am using a powered hub...

kraghot · 2016-01-05 18:19:40

I have tried to plug in another power source to the hub and the same thing happened. It seems to always happen after 1 keypress

DalekFrog · 2016-01-07 04:46:40

I went to several forums ,getting some tips,but I don't know if it work.

According to others said, you should prepare both USB installer and TF card installer(same feature but in different media type),

when you choose to boot Arch in UEFI ,the Linux kernel in the liveUSB can not drive OTG deivces .So you should put the TF card into the slot immediately. And the pad will boot from TF card .

Can you try this ,and let us know if it work.

Because I want to buy a Linux pad too.

P.S. Have you tried Ubuntu or other Linux OS?

kraghot · 2016-01-09 13:50:05

DalekFrog wrote:

when you choose to boot Arch in UEFI ,the Linux kernel in the liveUSB can not drive OTG deivces .So you should put the TF card into the slot immediately.

That would make sense, I'm waiting for it to charge, then I'll try.

DalekFrog wrote:

P.S. Have you tried Ubuntu or other Linux OS?

Not yet, I really want Arch but any other linux will be better than windows.

kraghot · 2016-01-09 18:33:54

And it lives:
http://i.imgur.com/tOG70Yt.jpg

-- read the Forum Etiquette and only post thumbnails http://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/For … s_and_code [jwr] --

DalekFrog · 2016-01-11 02:12:10

kraghot wrote:

And it lives:
http://i.imgur.com/tOG70Yt.jpg

cool

did every module work? like WIFI TOUCH OTG-HUB etc.

kraghot · 2016-01-13 09:38:31

Wifi doesn't, the wifi dongle is a rare one. There is a driver in development however. Touch I haven't tried but OTG works, I can't however decide where to install Arch, so I've stopped at booting it.

AlexN · 2016-02-09 14:38:59

Hello, I am considering buying the Teclast Power with the Intel X7-Z8700 and 8GB RAM.

Could you give an update about your efforts to install Arch (or any Linux distro) on your tablet? Is everything working now?

And what about battery duration?

Thanks

Alex

kraghot · 2016-02-19 13:41:02

AlexN wrote:

Hello, I am considering buying the Teclast Power with the Intel X7-Z8700 and 8GB RAM.
Could you give an update about your efforts to install Arch (or any Linux distro) on your tablet? Is everything working now?
And what about battery duration?
Thanks
Alex

Sorry about the delayed response. I had a lot of finals and as they are finally over I am free to continue. Unfortunately I haven't done anything other than boot the ISO. I'll clone the whole device memory today so that I can try install Arch without fears of bricking the device. I'll update you as soon as I have some new info

kraghot · 2016-02-19 17:19:11

So to answer the question about the battery duration, on Windows you can use it for around 8 hours of normal work. On android it will last a day.

So I have booted it up again, and I have the same problem: Windows partitions do not show up when doing lsblk and they are not to be found in /dev.
However when doing fdisk -l they actually appear. I am unclear as to why they are absent and would appreciate any input on how to mount them.
I heard it should be possible to name the bootloader the same as the Window's so when you select the Windows button in the boot screen it [should] boot to Linux, however, that remains to be tested.

I have also attemted to read the battery stats which worked out.
I have attempted to see if the touchscreen is getting recognized and I am happy to report that it seems to be working, I did cat /dev/input/by-id/... and it responded to my inputs perfectly.

I have made attempts to get the network adapter to show up (the notorious RTL8723BS), however it is a bit disconcerting that I could not get any sign of it. I tried lspci, lsusb, dmesg, but there was no trace of it . It's probably because the chip is an SDIO chip, and frankly I do not know how to list the SDIO devices.

I will be including all the files that I have gathered, in hopes of someone helping me and even better joining me in my effort.

https://mega.nz/#!yJJUVLxS!ZVuIPAEhCeOG … ZczPP6Fqkw

cl91 · 2016-02-19 23:05:44

(If I'm not mistaken) the wifi driver rtl8723bs is currently out-of-tree (https://github.com/hadess/rtl8723bs).

You probably want to build it as a kernel module with dkms and load it. There is an AUR package for it.

https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/rtl8723bs-dkms-git/

I am thinking of buying this tablet and put arch on it. So I'm very interested in your experience with it!

kraghot · 2016-02-19 23:13:45

You are correct. I have tried building and loading the drivers, however they load but the device doesn't show up in ip link. By further investigation it turned out that the adapter doesn't show up in /sys/bus/sdio/devices
I do not know what is causing this and I am very confused and don't know how to proceed. What worries me more is that those partitions now showing up. I don't even know how to go about that.
What I would like is to meet up in IRC with someone so we can both try and get this thing running

cl91 · 2016-02-19 23:38:55

Which IRC do you go to? I can try if I can be of some help.

kraghot · 2016-02-19 23:41:50

I usualy hang out in #archlinux on freenode. I'm going to sleep now, so we can get to work tomorrow

cl91 · 2016-02-20 03:07:23

Yeah I'm there as well. Note though I'm in NZ (GMT+13) so it might be a bit difficult to catch me (my morning is your late night. My afternoon is your midnight

yoj2ce · 2016-04-17 18:34:53

I don't have a tablet based on Cherry Trail, but I have a Bay Trail-T based tablet with the same WiFi module. I doubt the pkgbuild in AUR for the rtl8723bs driver will work anymore on newer versions of Linux.

I've been trying to get a working Arch installer for Bay Trail-T, and I have a working USB installer image now which has the driver for rtl8723bs SDIO-based WiFi.

Could you guys try out my PKGBUILD on Cherry Trail and tell me if you have WiFi?

http://watchmysys.com/blog/2016/03/linu … il-tablet/

Or if you'd like, I have also built the kernel and firmware packages:
http://watchmysys.com/blog/wp-content/u … pkg.tar.xz
http://watchmysys.com/blog/wp-content/u … pkg.tar.xz

You should be able to include those in the ARCH_201604 image and see if you have working WiFi in the installer environment.

I also have a full ARCH_201512 image built for Bay Trail-T, but since Bay Trail is using 32-bit UEFI I'm doubtful it will boot on Cherry Trail (which to my knowledge has 64-bit UEFI).

Edit: The kernel is x86_64. Only 32-bit portions of Bay Trail-T are the UEFI parts. It's 2016, even crummy Bay Trail-T tablets should run an x86_64 OS

Last edited by yoj2ce (2016-04-17 18:39:29)

demolitions · 2016-05-24 09:48:02

Just wanted to report here

I acquired a Teclast X98 Plus, it has almost the same hardware as the OP's X98 Pro.

I managed to boot arch install iso with DalekFrog's steps (USB + MicroSD), and installed Arch on all the internal flash, using a netgear USB WiFi dongle.
Installing yoj2ce's patched kernel and firmware enabled both the internal SDIO WiFi and Bluetooth, and I'm currently using it without issues.

Touchscreen works out of the box, both via evdev and libinput, only issue is that its coordinates are reversed compared to the screen, a little script now takes care of rotating the touchscreen reference based on which screen orientation is reported by xrandr.
Bluetooth works, but the device must be started and attached to the HCI bus before it can be used, another script takes care of that.
Direct Rendering works out of the box, with xf86-video-intel.

Things that currently don't work:
- Sound (Bluetooth speaker works via pulseaudio-bluetooth, internal sound isn't even detected).
- Battery status (currently working on it, I managed to enable it using i2c-dev and test_power modules, bridged by a tiny python script, but I have a horrible freezing issue).
- Accelerometer sensor (briefly tried iio-sensor-proxy, didn't work immediately, but I feel it can be coerced into working with a little tweaking).
- Cameras (pretty low in the priority list, they aren't detected on the USB bus)

The battery status issue is the first one I'll be tackling since without software power managers, using the tablet as a tablet (without connected charger) will drain the battery in less than 2 hours.

If anyone needs the scripts I have written/tweaked, I can set up a github project.

arokh · 2016-05-25 08:48:10

@kraghot

I've got the Wintel Pro CX-W8 which has a Cherry Trail x5-Z8300 cpu. I'm booting OpenELEC on it (with 4.6 kernel) and have pretty much the exact same USB keyboard issue as you. Most of the times USB does not work at all, but some times I get a keypress or two in before it stops working. On a rare occasion it works fully, but GPU causes kernel crash when playing videos. When it doesn't work, ethernet does not work either. Haven't been able to find a cause of this yet. Did you make any progress?

BTW, this tree supports HDMI audio with Cherry/Bay Trail: https://github.com/plbossart/sound/tree … -hdmi-v4.6

Arch Linux

#1 2016-01-04 21:30:24

Installing Arch Linux on a Teclast X98 pro Cherry Trail tablet

#2 2016-01-04 21:38:36

Re: Installing Arch Linux on a Teclast X98 pro Cherry Trail tablet

#3 2016-01-04 21:51:52

Re: Installing Arch Linux on a Teclast X98 pro Cherry Trail tablet

#4 2016-01-04 21:52:02

Re: Installing Arch Linux on a Teclast X98 pro Cherry Trail tablet

#5 2016-01-04 21:54:06

Re: Installing Arch Linux on a Teclast X98 pro Cherry Trail tablet

#6 2016-01-04 21:55:59

Re: Installing Arch Linux on a Teclast X98 pro Cherry Trail tablet

#7 2016-01-04 21:57:09

Re: Installing Arch Linux on a Teclast X98 pro Cherry Trail tablet

#8 2016-01-04 22:00:15

Re: Installing Arch Linux on a Teclast X98 pro Cherry Trail tablet

#9 2016-01-05 18:19:40

Re: Installing Arch Linux on a Teclast X98 pro Cherry Trail tablet

#10 2016-01-07 04:46:40

Re: Installing Arch Linux on a Teclast X98 pro Cherry Trail tablet

#11 2016-01-09 13:50:05

Re: Installing Arch Linux on a Teclast X98 pro Cherry Trail tablet

#12 2016-01-09 18:33:54

Re: Installing Arch Linux on a Teclast X98 pro Cherry Trail tablet

#13 2016-01-11 02:12:10

Re: Installing Arch Linux on a Teclast X98 pro Cherry Trail tablet

#14 2016-01-13 09:38:31

Re: Installing Arch Linux on a Teclast X98 pro Cherry Trail tablet

#15 2016-02-09 14:38:59

Re: Installing Arch Linux on a Teclast X98 pro Cherry Trail tablet

#16 2016-02-19 13:41:02

Re: Installing Arch Linux on a Teclast X98 pro Cherry Trail tablet

#17 2016-02-19 17:19:11

Re: Installing Arch Linux on a Teclast X98 pro Cherry Trail tablet

#18 2016-02-19 23:05:44

Re: Installing Arch Linux on a Teclast X98 pro Cherry Trail tablet

#19 2016-02-19 23:13:45

Re: Installing Arch Linux on a Teclast X98 pro Cherry Trail tablet

#20 2016-02-19 23:38:55

Re: Installing Arch Linux on a Teclast X98 pro Cherry Trail tablet

#21 2016-02-19 23:41:50

Re: Installing Arch Linux on a Teclast X98 pro Cherry Trail tablet

#22 2016-02-20 03:07:23

Re: Installing Arch Linux on a Teclast X98 pro Cherry Trail tablet

#23 2016-04-17 18:34:53

Re: Installing Arch Linux on a Teclast X98 pro Cherry Trail tablet

#24 2016-05-24 09:48:02

Re: Installing Arch Linux on a Teclast X98 pro Cherry Trail tablet

#25 2016-05-25 08:48:10

Re: Installing Arch Linux on a Teclast X98 pro Cherry Trail tablet

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