40.24 Theano ASUS Ultrabook UX31A

20200912

Originally a portable laptop device for presentations, travel and development. Later it served as a server for a household, hosting four hard drives for the local network. In addition, it became the multimedia device connected to the family large screen TV via VGA.

Specifications

Spec Details
Machine: ASUSTeK COMPUTER INC. UX31A/UX31A, BIOS UX31A.214 08/28/2012
CPU: 4 x Intel Core i7-3517U CPU @ 1.90GHz
Performance: PassMark=3677, BogoMIPS=4788
Memory: 4GiB
Boot: Grub2
Kernel: 5.3.0-24-generic

Originally installed Ubuntu 13.10. Press ESC on startup for boot menu.

Upgrade Ubuntu 19.10 to 20.04 20200502 Update from Ubutnu 19.10 to 20.04 through ssh connection, with warning that an additional ssh port is set up on 1022. Began by checking home folder for anything to back up first. Should really not be anything - keeping project work on git repositories, configurations in a git repository, and project and important files on a nextcloud server.

$ wajig update
$ wajig distupgrade
$ sudo reboot
$ wajig install update-manager-core
$ sudo do-release-upgrade -d
$ sudo umount /dev/sdc1
$ sudo fsck /dev/sdc1

All went smoothly. On reboot there was a message that the local disk drives should be checked for errors (/dev/sdc1, /dev/sdb1, and /dev/sde1, plus also do /dev/sdd1). This was performed at this time as above using fsck.

Upgrade Ubuntu 18.04 to 19.10 20191231 Run the following a couple of times to go from 18.04 to 19.04 and then to 19.10.

$ sudo do-release-upgrade

Grub Boots into Ubuntu by Default 20160416 This setup supports a typical user interested in only using Ubuntu as their main desktop.

Upgrade to Windows 10 20151130 Finally give in to the regular popup reminder to upgrade to Windows 10, through a 3GB download. No fix to Grub boot was required afterwards.

Ubuntu 14.04 Boot Timeout 20151125 Attempt to set boot to Windows by default with no timeout and SHIFT will go into Grub. Editing /etc/default/grub and then suggests that by design timeout options are ignored by /etc/grub.d/30_os-prober and so the scheme does not work.

Advise from https://gist.github.com/LeahCim/9332432 suggests that the grub file /etc/grub.d/30_os-prober overrides the Grub menu style and timeout defined by the user in /etc/default/grub. A workaround is to save the menu style and timeout values before os-prober changes them and restore them afterwards. Two files need to be placed under /etc/grub.d and made executable followed by sudo update-grub.

25_pre-os-prober:

#! /bin/sh
set -e

# Save the $timeout and $timeout_style values set by /etc/grub.d/00_header
# before /etc/grub.d/30_os-prober messes them up.

cat << EOF
set timeout_bak=\${timeout}
set timeout_style_bak=\${timeout_style}
EOF

35_post-os-prober:

#! /bin/sh
set -e

# Reset $timeout and $timeout_style to their original values
# set by /etc/grub.d/00_header before /etc/grub.d/30_os-prober messed them up.

cat << EOF
set timeout=\${timeout_bak}
set timeout_style=\${timeout_style_bak}
EOF

This worked with /etc/default/grub:

GRUB_DEFAULT="Windows UEFI loader"
GRUB_TIMEOUT=5
GRUB_TIMEOUT_STYLE=hidden

Now, on boot there is a 5 second wait during which ESC can be pressed to get the Grub menu, otherwise boot into Windows.

Upgrade Windows 8.1 20151015 Using Windows to use Skype for Business (Windows only) and it insisted on updating! It took quite some time and afterwards decided to upgrade to 8.1 also. After a few attempts and some Fail to upgrade (on the first auto upgrade) and reverting configs for 30 minutes finally it completed but it overwrote the MBR and so grub complained of unrecognized file format on boot and went no further. A simple solution:

grub rescue> set root=(hd0,gpt6)
grub rescue> set prefix=(hd0,gpt6)/boot/grub
grub rescue> insmod normal
grub rescue> normal
    
$ sudo update-grub
$ sudo grub-install /dev/sda

Upgrade Ubuntu 13.10 to 14.04 20140419 A simple overnight upgrade worked just fine.



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