I want to revive an old netbook (ASUS X205TA) and need to build my own iso for it. The laptop has a 32 bit EFI and a 64 bit processor, so I need to include a 32bit efi bootloader in the iso. It would be great if someone could help me to do so, I don’t have any experiences with the distro part of linux.
I have tried to follow [1] but building the iso doesn’t work with the description. There is also [2] but they also just say to modify the iso and dont really go into details.
You can take a look at this old forum posting to see if it can get you going. I haven’t done this in quite some time and each time I did there seemed to be a new hurdle. The Asus x205TA is similar to the Asus T100*. I no longer use my T100CHI.
The issue is that the current Manjaro ISO’s are in a read only format, so it is not possible to directly copy the bootia32.efi to the liveUSB.
Note: This is not an easy project for someone inexperienced in linux. The x205 was also a difficult device to get everything working. The ubuntu thread you referenced is the definitive source of information and for a number of years was a source of custom kernels especially for the X205. But at this point, most things work without custom kernel building.
This link shows distros that might support your device OOTB. Some of these like MX-Linux will support 64 bit OS on UEFI32. Linuxium might be another option as it has a good ISO generating script. Good Luck.
Thanks, after some more digging I found that there is a script to modify isos here [1], I hadn’t time to test it yet. The laptop is already running Debian with kernel 4.19 (at the time of installing, it was the only distro I could find that supported the 32 bit EFI and 64 bit OS) but it keeps freezing so I wanted to try a newer kernel to see if the freezing issue stopped.
The cstate freeze bug was “fixed” in kernel 5.3, although I’ve seen signs of it again in kernels 5.11 and 5.12 (every few days instead of hours.) Alternatively, you can add intel_idle.max_cstate=1 clocksource=tsc tsc=reliable to the kernel arguments to see if that helps.
That Ubuntu thread is a goldmine of support for running linux on the x205. I’m glad you have things working.
Haven’t had a freeze yet on the default kernel. The minimal Manjaro install is so great on devices with limited storage. The processor is surprisingly powerful compared to older netbooks that I have used :-), if the keyboard was better it would be a perfect laptop for writing.