Ubuntu on the chuwi hi10 pro

After trying Kali on the hi10 pro (its totally not ready for the bay-trail / cherry-trail platforms) I decided to give ubuntu on the chuwi hi10 pro a go (after hearing good things about their support) This is a short tutorial on dual booting ubuntu linux and windows10 on the chuwie hi10 pro. I seriously wouldn’t recommend this as an every-day system (support for the bay-trail / cherry trail SoC isn’t there yet – it will change in the future, but right now its terrible!)

1) Download the latest iso
I used ubuntu-gnome 17.04

2) Install to flash drive
I used etcher
Etcher works on osx, windows and linux, so its a good choice, though you could use unetbootin or rufus

3) Select the drive from the EFI boot menu (press f7 at boot on the chuwi hi10)

4) Select ‘install ubuntu’ from the grub menu

5) Follow the install instructions

Select ‘something else’ when it comes to the drive selection (or you will wipe your whole drive)

Partitioning is a little in-depth for this post, but I followed the instructions here and here

I removed everything before the windows (C) partition, except the very first partition and the two locked efi partitions (this gave 15gb for ubuntu + swap)

Watch the nice install messages

6) Reboot
Press f7 to get the uefi boot menu and select your new ubuntu install – you can now run Ubuntu on the chuwi hi10 pro

ubuntu on the chuwi hi10 pro

Ubuntu on the chuwi hi10 pro: Fixes

– Rotate your X display: settings > displays > select the display > click the rotate icon > click keep changes
Rotate your framebuffer
I didn’t do this on the ubuntu system because it hosed the kali system, I’m assuming that it would do the same, but have kept the instructions here incase you feel like a gamble.

You can rotate your virtual framebuffers using fbcon. 0 through 3 to represent the various rotations:

  • 0 – Normal rotation
  • < strong >1 – Rotate clockwise
  • < strong >2 – Rotate upside down
  • < strong >3 – Rotate counter-clockwise

These can be set from the command line by putting a value into the correct system file. Rotate the current framebuffer:


echo 1 | sudo tee /sys/class/graphics/fbcon/rotate

Rotate all virtual framebuffers:


echo 1 | sudo tee /sys/class/graphics/fbcon/rotate_all

If you want this to happen automatically when you start your system, you need to modify your boot loader configuration to give it the correct options. In /etc/default/grub add fbcon=rotate:1 to the GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX line:


GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX="fbcon=rotate:1"

(Don’t forget to run sudo update-grub after changing this file.)

Ubuntu on the chuwi hi10 pro – What doesnt work:

Touchscreen

There is a driver available at github.com/onitake/gslx680-acpi
Firmware for the touchscreen is at github.com/onitake/gsl-firmware

clone both repos, run ‘make’ in the gslx-acpi directory to build the driver and copy the file gsl-firmware/firmware/chuwi/hi10_pro/silead_ts.fw to /lib/firmware

insmod the new kernel driver from the gslx680-acpi directory

insmod ./gslx680_ts_acpi.ko

Check dmesg and touch the screen. It should work, though it will need calibrated. xinput_calibrator will help you here

Once the config is generated, save it to /use/X11/xorg.conf.d/99-calibration.conf

The touchscreen works, but its not accurate (and it seemed to be the wrong orientation / axes were mixed in my setup – I will post a followup once I can get it working)

wifi

I have a usb wifi dongle that works, so its not that bad – I’ll post a followup on getting the onboard wifi to work

This Post Has 4 Comments

      1. disqus_5qTqAxxezV

        jonathansblog wrote

  1. Aveem Ashfaq

    Hi. Did you get wifi working on it. I have just bought the tablet and everything works except for wifi. Annoyingly, wifi works in fedora but touchscreen is a mess to calibrate with libinput.

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