ASUS VivoPC-VM40B-02 Desktop

CUSTOMER REVIEW



Excellent, so... if you're not a linux user you can just skip my review. I didn't even boot into the Win8 install on here so I have no idea if it really works. I assume it does if I ever choose to boot into it one day. But for all the Linux people out there, this is what you need to do.



Make a USB bootable mint USB... plug it into the vivopc and power on... keep hitting F8 and you'll eventually get the menu listing your USB drive as a boot medium. It might be called ubuntu if you used unetbootin to make the usb-drive bootable. You won't see Boot-from-USB if there's no USB-bootable drive plugged in before power on.



Anyways, you'll be greeted with a completely blank screen(no blinking cursor or anything) after the "grub-like" menu appears and you select "start mint". What did I do to get past this? Go into the BIOS, disable Fastboot, disable Launch CSM, disable wifi, disable bluetooth.... then go try and boot again. It'll work. After that I started the install process and eventually it'll ask if you want to erase the entire harddrive to install MINT. If you don't care about Win8 you could just do that. I like to keep the windows install around in case I have hardware problems in Linux; I use windows to verify that the hardware works then I know it's just a linux driver issue. Also note that at this part you'll notice MINT telling you it couldn't detect any operating systems; don't worry... it'll find 'em later. So, I used the installer's partition-management option to resize the biggest windows partition I saw. It was like 300GB. I reduced it to 100GB, leaving me 200GB of free space on /dev/sda7. I told MINT to install there an make it the mount point "/"(root of the filesystem), no swap space. The install just goes and didn't ask me anything about grub install into MBR or root of linux-filesystem like in the old days. It just said, install complete and asked me to reboot. So I did.



On reboot, grub appeared and it had the Win8 boot in there as well as the LinuxMINT entry. So I booted into MINT.... and that's it. I haven't gone back into the BIOS to enable wifi or bluetooth because I don't care about those things. I only bought this to sit at my desk at home connected via ethernet-cable on the same table my router sits on... and I've never been a person who connected via bluetooth to any PC. I've always had usb mouse and keyboards. In the terminal, I typed this:



pikachu@POKEMONGYM ~ $ df -h .

Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on

/dev/sda7 181G 53G 120G 31% /

pikachu@POKEMONGYM ~ $ free -m

total used free shared buffers cached

Mem: 3854 3030 823 208 165 1460

-/+ buffers/cache: 1405 2449

Swap: 0 0 0

pikachu@POKEMONGYM ~ $ lspci

00:00.0 Host bridge: Intel Corporation 3rd Gen Core processor DRAM Controller (rev 09)

00:02.0 VGA compatible controller: Intel Corporation 3rd Gen Core processor Graphics Controller (rev 09)

00:14.0 USB controller: Intel Corporation 7 Series/C210 Series Chipset Family USB xHCI Host Controller (rev 04)

00:16.0 Communication controller: Intel Corporation 7 Series/C210 Series Chipset Family MEI Controller #1 (rev 04)

00:1a.0 USB controller: Intel Corporation 7 Series/C210 Series Chipset Family USB Enhanced Host Controller #2 (rev 04)

00:1b.0 Audio device: Intel Corporation 7 Series/C210 Series Chipset Family High Definition Audio Controller (rev 04)

00:1c.0 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation 7 Series/C210 Series Chipset Family PCI Express Root Port 1 (rev c4)

00:1c.2 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation 7 Series/C210 Series Chipset Family PCI Express Root Port 3 (rev c4)

00:1d.0 USB controller: Intel Corporation 7 Series/C210 Series Chipset Family USB Enhanced Host Controller #1 (rev 04)

00:1f.0 ISA bridge: Intel Corporation 7 Series Chipset Family LPC Controller (rev 04)

00:1f.2 SATA controller: Intel Corporation 7 Series Chipset Family 6-port SATA Controller [AHCI mode] (rev 04)

00:1f.3 SMBus: Intel Corporation 7 Series/C210 Series Chipset Family SMBus Controller (rev 04)

02:00.0 Ethernet controller: Realtek Semiconductor Co., Ltd. RTL8111/8168/8411 PCI Express Gigabit Ethernet Controller (rev 0c)

pikachu@POKEMONGYM ~ $



pikachu@POKEMONGYM ~ $ cat /proc/cpuinfo

processor : 0

vendor_id : GenuineIntel

cpu family : 6

model : 58

model name : Intel(R) Celeron(R) CPU 1007U @ 1.50GHz

stepping : 9

microcode : 0x17

cpu MHz : 800.000

cache size : 2048 KB

physical id : 0

siblings : 2

core id : 0

cpu cores : 2

apicid : 0

initial apicid : 0

fpu : yes

fpu_exception : yes

cpuid level : 13

wp : yes

flags : fpu vme de pse tsc msr pae mce cx8 apic sep mtrr pge mca cmov pat pse36 clflush dts acpi mmx fxsr sse sse2 ss ht tm pbe syscall nx rdtscp lm constant_tsc arch_perfmon pebs bts rep_good nopl xtopology nonstop_tsc aperfmperf eagerfpu pni pclmulqdq dtes64 monitor ds_cpl vmx est tm2 ssse3 cx16 xtpr pdcm pcid sse4_1 sse4_2 x2apic popcnt tsc_deadline_timer xsave lahf_lm arat epb xsaveopt pln pts dtherm tpr_shadow vnmi flexpriority ept vpid fsgsbase smep erms

bogomips : 2993.24

clflush size : 64

cache_alignment : 64

address sizes : 36 bits physical, 48 bits virtual

power management:



processor : 1

vendor_id : GenuineIntel

cpu family : 6

model : 58

model name : Intel(R) Celeron(R) CPU 1007U @ 1.50GHz

stepping : 9

microcode : 0x17

cpu MHz : 800.000

cache size : 2048 KB

physical id : 0

siblings : 2

core id : 1

cpu cores : 2

apicid : 2

initial apicid : 2

fpu : yes

fpu_exception : yes

cpuid level : 13

wp : yes

flags : fpu vme de pse tsc msr pae mce cx8 apic sep mtrr pge mca cmov pat pse36 clflush dts acpi mmx fxsr sse sse2 ss ht tm pbe syscall nx rdtscp lm constant_tsc arch_perfmon pebs bts rep_good nopl xtopology nonstop_tsc aperfmperf eagerfpu pni pclmulqdq dtes64 monitor ds_cpl vmx est tm2 ssse3 cx16 xtpr pdcm pcid sse4_1 sse4_2 x2apic popcnt tsc_deadline_timer xsave lahf_lm arat epb xsaveopt pln pts dtherm tpr_shadow vnmi flexpriority ept vpid fsgsbase smep erms

bogomips : 2993.24

clflush size : 64

cache_alignment : 64

address sizes : 36 bits physical, 48 bits virtual

power management:



Pleasantly surprised to find 4GB RAM, I was pretty certain I ordered a 2GB model during the checkout process... but whatever!!!



---EDIT---: Oh, you folks rating my review as helpful eh? Okay then, let me add some more. I went into the bios to enable bluetooth and wifi after doing an apt-get update && apt-get upgrade; the machine still boots into Linux MINT just fine and now:



pikachu@POKEMONGYM ~ $ uname -a

Linux POKEMONGYM 3.13.0-24-generic #47-Ubuntu SMP Fri May 2 23:30:00 UTC 2014 x86_64 x86_64 x86_64 GNU/Linux

pikachu@POKEMONGYM ~ $



pikachu@POKEMONGYM ~ $ lspci

00:00.0 Host bridge: Intel Corporation 3rd Gen Core processor DRAM Controller (rev 09)

00:02.0 VGA compatible controller: Intel Corporation 3rd Gen Core processor Graphics Controller (rev 09)

00:14.0 USB controller: Intel Corporation 7 Series/C210 Series Chipset Family USB xHCI Host Controller (rev 04)

00:16.0 Communication controller: Intel Corporation 7 Series/C210 Series Chipset Family MEI Controller #1 (rev 04)

00:1a.0 USB controller: Intel Corporation 7 Series/C210 Series Chipset Family USB Enhanced Host Controller #2 (rev 04)

00:1b.0 Audio device: Intel Corporation 7 Series/C210 Series Chipset Family High Definition Audio Controller (rev 04)

00:1c.0 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation 7 Series/C210 Series Chipset Family PCI Express Root Port 1 (rev c4)

00:1c.1 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation 7 Series/C210 Series Chipset Family PCI Express Root Port 2 (rev c4)

00:1c.2 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation 7 Series/C210 Series Chipset Family PCI Express Root Port 3 (rev c4)

00:1d.0 USB controller: Intel Corporation 7 Series/C210 Series Chipset Family USB Enhanced Host Controller #1 (rev 04)

00:1f.0 ISA bridge: Intel Corporation 7 Series Chipset Family LPC Controller (rev 04)

00:1f.2 SATA controller: Intel Corporation 7 Series Chipset Family 6-port SATA Controller [AHCI mode] (rev 04)

00:1f.3 SMBus: Intel Corporation 7 Series/C210 Series Chipset Family SMBus Controller (rev 04)

02:00.0 Network controller: Realtek Semiconductor Co., Ltd. RTL8821AE 802.11ac PCIe Wireless Network Adapter

03:00.0 Ethernet controller: Realtek Semiconductor Co., Ltd. RTL8111/8168/8411 PCI Express Gigabit Ethernet Controller (rev 0c)



pikachu@POKEMONGYM ~ $ ifconfig wlan0

wlan0 Link encap:Ethernet HWaddr 54:27:1e:b3:8e:d9

UP BROADCAST MULTICAST MTU:1500 Metric:1

RX packets:0 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0

TX packets:0 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0

collisions:0 txqueuelen:1000

RX bytes:0 (0.0 B) TX bytes:0 (0.0 B)



pikachu@POKEMONGYM ~ $ dmesg|grep Bluetooth

[ 2.268653] usb 2-1.4: Product: Bluetooth Radio

[ 12.794605] Bluetooth: Core ver 2.17

[ 12.794663] Bluetooth: HCI device and connection manager initialized

[ 12.794672] Bluetooth: HCI socket layer initialized

[ 12.794675] Bluetooth: L2CAP socket layer initialized

[ 12.794685] Bluetooth: SCO socket layer initialized

[ 16.769203] Bluetooth: BNEP (Ethernet Emulation) ver 1.3

[ 16.769210] Bluetooth: BNEP filters: protocol multicast

[ 16.769269] Bluetooth: BNEP socket layer initialized

[ 16.780867] Bluetooth: RFCOMM TTY layer initialized

[ 16.780883] Bluetooth: RFCOMM socket layer initialized

[ 16.780891] Bluetooth: RFCOMM ver 1.11



Various wireless stuff in dmesg:

[ 13.629514] rtlwifi: wireless switch is on

[ 13.629538] rtl8821ae-0:rtl_pci_intr_mode_legacy():<0-0> Pin-based Interrupt Mode!

[ 13.871096] cfg80211: World regulatory domain updated:

[ 13.871102] cfg80211: (start_freq - end_freq @ bandwidth), (max_antenna_gain, max_eirp)

[ 13.871105] cfg80211: (2402000 KHz - 2472000 KHz @ 40000 KHz), (300 mBi, 2000 mBm)

[ 13.871108] cfg80211: (2457000 KHz - 2482000 KHz @ 40000 KHz), (300 mBi, 2000 mBm)

[ 13.871110] cfg80211: (2474000 KHz - 2494000 KHz @ 20000 KHz), (300 mBi, 2000 mBm)

[ 13.871112] cfg80211: (5170000 KHz - 5250000 KHz @ 40000 KHz), (300 mBi, 2000 mBm)

[ 13.871114] cfg80211: (5735000 KHz - 5835000 KHz @ 40000 KHz), (300 mBi, 2000 mBm)

[ 13.871135] cfg80211: Calling CRDA for country: US

[ 13.875845] cfg80211: Regulatory domain changed to country: US

[ 13.875851] cfg80211: (start_freq - end_freq @ bandwidth), (max_antenna_gain, max_eirp)

[ 13.875854] cfg80211: (2402000 KHz - 2472000 KHz @ 40000 KHz), (300 mBi, 2700 mBm)

[ 13.875856] cfg80211: (5170000 KHz - 5250000 KHz @ 40000 KHz), (300 mBi, 1700 mBm)

[ 13.875858] cfg80211: (5250000 KHz - 5330000 KHz @ 40000 KHz), (300 mBi, 2000 mBm)

[ 13.875860] cfg80211: (5490000 KHz - 5600000 KHz @ 40000 KHz), (300 mBi, 2000 mBm)

[ 13.875862] cfg80211: (5650000 KHz - 5710000 KHz @ 40000 KHz), (300 mBi, 2000 mBm)

[ 13.875864] cfg80211: (5735000 KHz - 5835000 KHz @ 40000 KHz), (300 mBi, 3000 mBm)

[ 13.875866] cfg80211: (57240000 KHz - 63720000 KHz @ 2160000 KHz), (N/A, 4000 mBm)

[ 22.907197] rtl8821ae-0:rtl8821ae_phy_switch_wirelessband():<0-0> 5G

[ 24.310782] rtl8821ae-0:rtl8821ae_phy_switch_wirelessband():<0-0> 2.4G



While I haven't actually tested the wifi & bluetooth, I assume if linux can see & init them like this... it probably works or at least very close to working.