Hi CLUG, I am documenting here in the hope that it may help someone searching the archives.
After issues with the wife's Acer (see charging socket saga on another thread) we decided to get a spare computer. First of all, kudos to the sales guy at PCS Unlimited on Papanui Rd. When I said I'm only buying this if I can easily turn off secureboot to install linux, this guy took the time to fiddle around and try to get into the bios/eufi settings. Eventually he figured out a convoluted way through some advanced Windows 8 diagnostic/recovery menus, and then took the time to step me through exactly how to get to the screen where secureboot can be turned on and off. I later worked out that pressing "delete" key straight after power on gets you there quicker. He was trying F2. After LinuxMint-Mate-64-v17.2 wouldn't even boot from pendrive (freezes at splash screen) I eventually managed to get 17.1 to install. But then it turned to custard - random, intermittant freezing during boot, more often than not. Tried all the grub options - nomodeset, noacpi etc --- to no avail. Then I found a forum post from December 2014 from someone with the same model and the same problem. That guy said it worked after a BIOS update. But my BIOS was dated more recently than that post! Anyway, turns out ASUS BIOS updates are really easy. You don't need a Windows-only utility. You can flash it straight from with-in the BIOS set-up itself, from a downloaded image from ASUS website. Just put the image on a FAT16 or FAT32 formatted USB pendrive and boot into the BIOS set-up screen and select UPDATE. So I did that but the problem didn't go away. Finally, looking through all the options in the BIOS set-up screens I found on the Advanced tab you can choose between two BIOS modes: 1 for Win8 and another for Win7. By switching to Win7 the problems disappeared. So apparently, Windows 7 requires some backwards compatibility mode, which Linux also requires to run on ASUS hardware. So if anyone is reading this after searching for Linux X453M crashes during start-up - here's the answer: Turn on the computer and immediately press "delete" key top right corner to get into the BIOS settings. Go to the "Advanced" tab and where it says "OS Selection" change it from "Windows 8" to "Windows 7" Save and restart. Hope this helps Yuri de Groot _______________________________________________ Linux-users mailing list Linux-users@lists.canterbury.ac.nz http://lists.canterbury.ac.nz/mailman/listinfo/linux-users
