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I recently installed Ubuntu 14.10 on a Winbook Tw100 (bay trail) windows 8 tablet. I was going to install 15.04, but it was not able to install (it could only run in LiveCD mode). Surprisingly enough, some things that worked in 15.04 don't work in 14.10.

Things that don't work in 14.10, but that did in 15.04:
1. Touchscreen (goodix brand)
2. ACPI (battery detection, power management)

I can't just install Ubuntu 15.04, it won't install on my tablet (keeps freezing, randomly restarting). Is there any way I could take the working drivers that I need from Ubuntu 15.04, and put them into 14.10 without having to upgrade the entire kernel?

Also, anyone who knows where I can find the realtek rtl8723bs (WiFi/Bluetooth) drivers, that would be much appreciated, they don't come with any Ubuntu version yet.

3 Answers 3

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the wifi drivers (bt doesn't) are available and they must be compiled (so forget to "intall & go"), but it seems (i've understood into the nebulous galaxy of intel bay trail's obscure engineering) to have some problems with the kernel 3.18 of ubuntu 15.04 because on many different moatherboard can't enumerate correctly.

The reason could be the nature of the adapter, SDIO type, and all they have done for successful start is only on wifi side and without wpa supplicant (so open wifi only), almost until few weeks ago. The best should be compile manually starting from sources of Ubuntu's kernel 14.10.

See on this link: http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=2249936

and this:https://github.com/hadess/rtl8723bs/issues/10

I'm sorry to be without a best solution but i'm in the same problem too and there's no easy ways at the moment therefore many people is trying to solve and i'm sure soon there will be driver for a good ubuntu experience...

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  • during searches i've seen this thread talking about the problerm.. there's another fork for wifi sdio adapter...
    – Sabax
    May 11, 2015 at 12:37
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I have the same tablet, Winbook TW100, and could never install 15.04 from the USB drive although 15.04 did work when running from the USB drive. So I installed 14.10 and ran it for a week. Today I tried a new approach and changed the software sources to look for upgrades (newer versions of Ubuntu) It found 15.04 and I was able to upgrade from 14.10 to 15.04 using the default ubuntu upgrade method on my TW100. I am still searching for more info to get everything else working but wanted to pass along what worked to get 15.04 running on the TW100.

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  • When you updated 14.10 to 15.04, did the touchscreen/acpi drivers come with the update?
    – Ulincsys
    May 27, 2015 at 3:11
  • Actually the touchscreen worked with 14.10 with all the recent updates. When I updated to 15.04 the touchscreen still worked but it was inverted so it touched the screen in the wrong place (caddy corner). I used Xinput_calibrator to fix it on 15.04 to touch in the correct spot. The only issue I have noticed so far is that the tablet freezes up often and I have to use the push buttons to restart it. The battery and power management work on 15.04, I haven't tried bluetooth yet May 28, 2015 at 5:14
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To install Ubuntu 15.04 and 15.10, add the following to the kernel line before booting the live system

intel_idle.max_cstate=1 intel.pstate=disable

This will stop it from freezing and other weird stuff.

After installation you need to add these lines to your systems kernel line. On some SoC versions you also need to add "nomodeset" and remove the "gfxmode" line.

sed -i '/gfxmode \\\$linux_gfx_mode/s/.*/echo \-n/' <INSTALLATION>/etc/grub.d/10_linux
sed -i '/GRUB_CMDLINE_DEFAULT=/s/".*"/"intel_idle.max_cstate=1 intel.pstate=disable nomodeset"/' <INSTALLATION>/etc/default/grub

And you need to install a proper boot loader version

apt-get purge grub-efi-amd64 grub-efi-amd64-bin
apt-get install grub-efi-ia32 grub-efi-ia32-bin
grub-install --efi-directory=/boot/efi --boot-directory=/boot
update-grub

Which of cause needs to be done from chroot.

To get the touchscreen to work a little better, I found the 4.3.3 mainline kernel to be a good choice for both 15.04 and 15.10.

If you like Gnome Shell, I would stick with Ubuntu 15.04. The Gnome team has broken a lot of touch based stuff in Gnome Shell 3.16, On-Screen keyboard being one of them.

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  • Thanks for your reply, I will test this out soon. Also, I have found that 15.10 fixes almost all the instability problems that 15.04 faced on the baytrail platform.
    – Ulincsys
    Jan 2, 2016 at 21:17
  • Well that may be the case for some. But Bay Trail is not just one SoC, there are several versions. Also the Tablet devices contains more than just the Bay Trail chip, so even when all the SoC versions are supported, it does not mean the same for each device's remaining hardware.
    – Daniel B
    Jan 3, 2016 at 9:42

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