I’ve had this laptop for a few years now, and it’s still quite the nice machine. About a month ago, I decided to do the distribution upgrade and upgrade it from 16.04 to 18.04. It worked, mostly, sort of. I spent a bit of time having to tweak things and after a few weeks, the machine was once again stable enough to use as a reliable workstation.
Continue ReadingUPDATE - Dec 1, 2018 - I’ve Finally installed Ubuntu 18.04 LTS on the Asus ZenBook UX501VW
First off, let me first say, what a nightmare this was. After the relative ease of installing Ubuntu 15.10 on the ZenBook I was more than a bit disappointed with how difficult it was installing Ubuntu 16.04.
Continue ReadingAfter writing about installing Ubuntu 14.04 on the ZenBook Pro I used it for about a month or so, but was not really happy with it. Nothing seemed quite right. Fonts were off, cursor sizes were off, applications didn’t look quite like they were supposed to, accelerated graphics didn’t quite work, etc. Don’t get me wrong, everything worked, but not as smoothly as I would have liked. So, I tried a few different things.
Continue ReadingUpdate 2016-04-25, this post is obsolete. I now have information on installing Ubuntu 16.04 at https://marclewis.com/2016/04/25/installing-ubuntu-16-04-lts-on-asus-zenbook-ux501vw/
After receiving my new ASUS ZenBook Pro UX501VW, the first thing I did was prepare it to dual boot between Windows 10 and Ubuntu. I’m not a fan of Windows at all, but I do understand that sometimes its required, so I need to dual boot.
Continue ReadingYesterday I attempted to upgrade from Ubuntu 13.10 to 14.04 on my office system. It failed. Everything appeared to go smoothly, but after rebooting, I got a black screen. No grub menu, no grub failure menu. I attempted to reinstall grub from a live image, but that failed too. I had an extra Intel 160GB SSD so I decided to a fresh install. Its been over a year since I did a clean install so I had a lot of cruft installed, so a clean install would take care of that, and would probably take less time than repairing the install.
Continue ReadingThis posting is mostly just a reference for myself since I don’t do this often enough for me to have it memorized. These are the steps I use to create LUKS encrypted disks to use as a backup target that I can take off-site. Since they’re off site and stored in my desk where others may have access to the disks, I want to make sure that I’m the only one with access to the data. I use bare OEM style hard drives in a Thermaltake BlacX hard drive docking station. I have one at home and one at the office.
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