S96J/Z96J and Linux

My ASUS Z96J arrived last week and it was kind of a ***** to get Linux installed on it. What I'm about to say also applies to the ASUS S96J. I was specifically trying to get Kubuntu 6.06 installed, though I also tried OpenSuSE 10.1.

The problem is that there's some conflict with the 96J which results in the laptop not being able to find the hard drive after the installation is complete. This means that once you've installed it and you reboot, it essentially dies. This happened with Kubuntu 6.06 and OpenSuSE. You could boot by specifying acpi=off on the grub bootup command but then the system pauses every 30 s or so.

I initially thought the problem was with the ACPI implementation. ASUS has notoriously bad DSDT code in the BIOS (as do several other manufacturers) and this is a problem which affects many ASUS laptops and desktops. Most of the time, people don't notice because the workarounds are already in place.

In this case, though, the problem seems to have been the 2.6.15 kernel. It's not clear if there's a bug in the kernel (probably in the SATA code) but it seems likely. However, the 2.6.17.9 kernel (possibly earlier onces) does not suffer from this problem. The solution, then, is to install a custom kernel. Once that's done, the system boots up just fine. Another person has reported that just using the kernel from Edgy Eft works fine as well though I have not tested this (and would be concerned as my syslog was filling up with LCD warnings with a vanilla kernel).

Even the 'easy' solution is perhaps more work than a person new to Linux is willing to try but it isn't that tough. See https://launchpad.net/distros/ubuntu/+source/linux-source-2.6.15/+bug/48556 for more discussion of this topic.

Note that Gentoo Linux did not seem to suffer from this problem, so that is another approach you could take. Gentoo isn't for the faint of heart, though.

 

Yes, i ran into this problem with my S96J. Im glad you investigated more and posted results.

I would like to add that Kanotix and Fedora Core 5 will work with the S/Z 96J, no kernel updates required.

 

For further reading enjoyment..

(Prior to considering this complicated workaround, you may try and see if you can boot by turning ACPI off, by appending acpi=off to your kernel boot command.) For a temporary fix that doesn't require you to turn ACPI off, and from the thread discussing the problem and a temporary workaround fix;
http://www.ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=216039

Good Luck to anyone who has this problem.. (hopefully Ubuntu engineers will get the fix into a near term update, and you won't have to worry about this anymore..)

 

I tried using Ubuntu 6.06, but ran into the boot problems. So I proceeded to try Edgy Eft and it seems to boot up with no problems whatsoever.

 

Has anyone tried it with Ubuntu 6.06.1 ?

 

I don't know which Ubuntu i tried but it was in july and i think i twas the same problem. WHen booting up it could not mount my root filesystem and didn't recognize my linux partition. However, i tried instsaling opensuse 10.1 and it worked like a charm, not sure why suse didn't work for you.

I've been trying to get kubuntu on this machine because the ubuntu forums seem to be more consolidated. There are like 123123 different suse forums and I'm nto even sure if people are still active on them or not...

Thanks for the workaround, I hope this works.