Linux On The NUC: Using Ubuntu, Mint, Fedora, And The SteamOS Beta

[Turk]

By Andrew Cunningham - Feb 2 2014, 12:00am AEST
Intel's mini desktop handles four prominent distros with a few headaches.

Intel's NUC: not just for Windows.


One of the drawbacks of buying a barebones PC like Intel’s NUC—at least if you’re a Windows user—is that it comes with no operating system. The big PC OEMs get Windows at a steep discount compared to end users, and you’ll have to pay somewhere in the neighborhood of $100 for a full OEM Windows license (and more if you want a retail version with tech support).

The other side of that coin is that barebones PCs can be good for people who aren’t planning on paying for an OS. You can use your favorite Linux distribution on a barebones PC without paying the added cost for some Windows license you have no intention of using.

As a follow-up to our original review, we’ve installed four different Linux distributions to the Haswell NUC to get an idea of what open source enthusiasts can expect to experience when they load up Linux on the hardware. We tried Ubuntu 13.10, Linux Mint 16, and Fedora 20 because of their popularity, and then we loaded up SteamOS to test out its recently acquired Intel graphics support.
Installation

UNetbootin is probably the easiest way to make USB install drives for major Linux distributions.

UNetbootin is still an easy way to load most Linux distributions onto a USB drive. For both Ubuntu and Mint, all you need to do is download the ISO you want, point the program at the ISO and your USB drive of choice, and UNetbootin will do the rest. For whatever reason, UNetbootin wouldn't create a functioning live USB key for Fedora—it would boot but fail over to Emergency Mode without trying to install anything. Creating USB install media with Fedora's own utility remedied the problem.

Many Windows computers include features like Fastboot or Secure Boot that need to be disabled or circumvented to use Linux in UEFI mode, and while the NUC supports these features for Windows, they aren’t enabled by default. Installing Linux on the NUC should have been the easiest part of the whole process, but for most of our distributions it ended up being a gigantic pain, and that comes down to the NUC's EFI implementation.

Enlarge / The NUC supports features like Secure Boot, but it keeps them disabled by default. The real problem is the NUC's EFI implementation.
Each time we would install one of our Debian-based distros (Ubuntu, Mint, or SteamOS), the NUC would boot to the USB drive and install the operating system to the internal mSATA SSD without issue. The problem was that the NUC wouldn't see the drive as a EFI boot target, and it would refuse to boot from the drive. The first helpful suggestion I found about the issue came from Tested.com's Will Smith on the Steam community forums. He suggested that the NUC had problems with custom EFI boot locations—the NUC expects there to be a file named bootx64.efi located in the /EFI/BOOT folder on the EFI partition, and if that file is named something else and/or located elsewhere, the computer can't recognize the drive as a boot target. The Debian distros will usually try to place a bootloader named grubx64.efi in a folder named /EFI/[distro name], so the NUC wouldn't try to boot from the drive.

There are a couple of ways you can try to fix this. The first is to use Ubuntu's boot-repair tool, though it can occasionally be overzealous and inconsistent in its fixes. The second is to move and rename the files manually. While that is a little more difficult, it has the benefit of being consistent. From our Ubuntu live USB drive, finish the operating system installation but don't reboot. Instead, open a terminal window and type the following:

These instructions apply to Ubuntu specifically, but they worked the same way for SteamOS and Mint, and they should get the job done for any other Debian distribution that behaves the same way. Just check which folder the operating system stores its bootloader files in—it's /mnt/EFI/ubuntu for Ubuntu, /mnt/EFI/steamos for Steam OS, and so on. We've passed all of our findings on to Intel's NUC team, and while we haven't received a response as of publication, we hope that this problem can be fixed with a BIOS update.

Once UEFI was working properly and the operating systems were actually booting, Ubuntu, Mint, and Fedora didn't give us any more trouble with installation. While installing SteamOS, the default image-based installer didn’t seem to want to see the internal mSATA hard drive for some reason—it would attempt to image the hard drive via CloneZilla, but it consistently errored out. It worked fine using the custom Debian-based installer, aside from the EFI problems.

Power consumption

One of the draws of the NUC, aside from its small physical footprint, is its small power footprint. In Windows, it idles at around 6W, displays YouTube videos in Chrome with about 9W, and won’t consume more than 38W even when gaming at full-tilt. Not all of the tests we ran in our original review will run under Linux, but we’ve gotten a few more numbers for our Linux distros to get an idea of how they all stack up.

Activity

Generally, the NUC’s power consumption figures under Linux are pretty near where they are in Windows, though Windows seems to be a little less power-hungry in sleep mode. The standard desktop Linux distributions are all pretty similar no matter what you're doing, which isn't surprising—there's a fair degree of commonality in drivers across the biggest distributions, after all.

Of the four Linux distros, SteamOS is the most interesting. For one, getting the NUC to sleep was impossible—it would go to sleep for just a couple of seconds before waking back up even if no input devices were plugged in, foreshadowing some of the other problems we’ll talk about soon. What’s more striking is just how active the SteamOS UI keeps the CPU and GPU. Sitting still on the SteamOS menus consumes almost as much power as actually playing a game. These figures might differ on a more powerful machine with a stronger GPU (it doesn’t take a whole lot to max out the HD 5000), but in any case, it’s much higher than in a less demanding desktop OS.
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What doesn’t work

On the right hardware, installing and running Linux can be almost as simple and seamless as putting OS X on a Mac. The operating system has a bunch of built-in drivers for your hardware, and expanding to closed source, “non-free” drivers will get you even closer. When it works, it’s vastly preferable to the driver-hunting that Windows PCs can sometimes require. When it doesn’t, as can often happen (especially on newer hardware), getting things to work in Linux can be a nightmare for neophytes. Here’s what did and didn’t work in each of our three distributions.

The Intel 7260 Wi-Fi and Bluetooth card caused the most problems across all three Linux distributions.

Of the three, Ubuntu probably behaved the best—its status as one of the more popular distributions makes it a common target for developers. The Intel HD 5000 GPU worked fine, playing games from Steam for Linux and displaying full-screen HD video from Hulu and YouTube without stuttering or tearing. Audio through the front headphone jack and the rear HDMI port also worked fine, though you may need to set your audio output device manually the first time you hook something up. The gigabit Ethernet port worked without incident.

The only real problem was with the Intel 7260 802.11ac Wi-Fi plus Bluetooth 4.0 adapter we selected for our NUC. Wi-Fi would sort of work out of the box—connecting to a 2.4GHz WPA2-protected Wi-Fi network was fine, but the computer wouldn’t connect to a 5GHz WPA2 network. It would attempt to connect but fail as it would if the password had been mistyped. Bluetooth wouldn’t work at all, necessitating an external Bluetooth dongle to connect to our wireless accessories. Throughout our testing with Ubuntu, Mint, and SteamOS, the Wi-Fi card was consistently one of the NUC’s worst-behaved components.

When we asked Intel about the problems, the company indicated that it might be a driver issue, though we had the same problems even after installing the most recent version of the iwlwifi driver. The Bluetooth problems could also be related to USB—the Bluetooth part of the 7260 adapter uses USB, and Intel told us that if the operating system wasn’t initializing the adapter properly or if the USB driver was ignoring it, that could be causing the problem.

Support for the Intel 7260 adapter in the Linux kernel is still relatively new—Ubuntu 13.10 uses kernel version 3.11, and support was introduced in version 3.10. We’d expect the bugs to be ironed out in coming updates.

Mint 16

Linux Mint 16 is based on the Ubuntu 13.10 distribution, but that doesn’t mean the two act the same on the NUC. For example, the Intel 7260’s Bluetooth adapter actually worked out of the box, even though the Wi-Fi part of the card had the same difficulty connecting to a 5GHz WPA2 Wi-Fi network that it did in Ubuntu.

Most of the other hardware works fine in Mint. As in Ubuntu, audio came through the headphone jacks and HDMI port just fine as long as you selected the right output device in the settings. The Ethernet jack likewise works without issue.

Haswell’s integrated GPU was another story. Using the default graphics drivers caused serious rendering problems for some games installed from Steam for Linux. Portal, for example, launches and runs but is missing most of its textures, making it unplayable. There’s also noticeable tearing when playing videos from Hulu and YouTube, though the problems are less noticeable. If you aren’t gaming, it’s possible that you won’t notice or care about the GPU’s anomalies. While our observations are based on the version of the graphics driver included with Mint by default, it’s possible that installing a newer or different driver could clear these problems up. However, Intel's graphics driver installer for Linux supports only Ubuntu and Fedora and not distributions based on those distributions. While it's theoretically possible to get an updated driver working anyway, there's not much guidance out there for it right now.

Fedora 20

As usual, the Wi-Fi card was a source of frustration once Fedora was up and running—2.4GHz Wi-Fi worked, but 5GHz Wi-Fi wouldn't connect to our WPA2 network, and Bluetooth was unavailable. Audio through the headphone jack and over HDMI worked fine, as did wired Ethernet.

Portal in Fedora is fine in all the ways that count, but it might be missing a font or two.

Portal and other 3D games also ran just fine in Fedora after we installed it and Steam for Linux. We noticed none of the missing textures that we experienced in Mint. It looks like Fedora may be missing some fonts that the other distros and Windows both include (check out the serif title font in the screenshot above), but that's a minor quibble that probably won't actually affect your gameplay.

We didn't have major problems with Fedora aside from the Wi-Fi card, but we did have a couple of minor ones. We noticed some graphical corruption every now and again, once while sitting at the desktop not doing anything in particular (the computer stopped responding to input and needed to be hard-rebooted) and once when waking the screen back up from sleep (this corruption disappeared as soon as we began interacting with the software). Watching video and playing games worked fine, but it seems as though the video driver in Fedora isn't quite perfect yet. Finally, when booting the system, there was a period of about 10 seconds between when the login screen appeared and when it would accept input from our USB peripherals. System-breaking Achilles heel? Not really. Annoying? Sure.

SteamOS

SteamOS added Intel GPU support earlier this month after an Nvidia-only launch.

Unlike the other two distributions we used, SteamOS is very much in beta. New builds are being released daily or near daily, and hardware support is still being added and tweaked daily. Support for Intel GPUs was only added on January 8th. Audio through the NUC's headphone jack and HDMI port wasn't working when we tested them on January 15th, but they worked right out of the box on January 31st. Things are still evolving rapidly.

The SteamOS UI runs reasonably well on the NUC at 1080p and 720p, though in 1080p especially we could notice a difference between it and our custom Nvidia GTX 660-powered Steam Machine. There's definitely some stuttering here and there, especially when there are lots of objects onscreen at once. Gaming performance won't be as good as a computer with a dedicated GPU, but the titles we tried looked and ran fine and didn't exhibit any of Mint's rendering problems.

While hardware support was generally pretty good, the NUC refuses to enter sleep mode and stay there. Put the computer to sleep, even with no accessories connected to it, and it will wake back up as soon as it finishes going to sleep. And, of course, we had problems with the Intel 7260 Wi-Fi adapter. Out of the box, Bluetooth worked fine, but there wasn't any Wi-Fi at all. We added Debian Wheezy's non-free repositories so we could download and install the Intel's iwlwifi driver. This got Wi-Fi working about as well as it did in Ubuntu, but it completely disabled Bluetooth.

A good Linux box, depending on your distro

Running Linux on the NUC isn't much different from using Linux on any PC hardware. Often, things work exactly the way they're supposed to. When they don't, it could quickly get frustrating for casual Linux users—at best, you'll be able to resolve your problem with some Google-fu and a few minutes at the terminal, and at worst you'll be swearing and throwing things as you try for the tenth time to compile some driver from source or realize you've moved your EFI boot file to the wrong place.

The biggest sticking point was the Intel 7260 Wi-Fi card, which worked inconsistently or not at all. This is still a very new piece of hardware, and stepping back to an older 802.11n version, or an equivalent from another vendor, might fix your problem. As the drivers mature in the coming months, problems like the ones we had getting Wi-Fi and Bluetooth to work will likely be smoothed out. Such is the way of using newer hardware with Linux—the market share is smaller, so manufacturers take Linux drivers and compatibility less seriously, and the user experience suffers for it. The further you move away from a popular distribution like Ubuntu, the more likely you are to have hardware compatibility problems.

For more advanced users who don't mind these kinds of hardware headaches (or simply don't intend to use Wi-Fi), the NUC is a capable little Linux box. Assuming you can get the hardware working the way you want, the system's power consumption numbers are impressive, and the small fan is no more annoying than it is under Windows. If you're a Linux neophyte looking for a completely seamless experience, the NUC isn't quite there, but there's nothing wrong with it that can't be fixed by a few driver and BIOS updates down the line.
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http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2014/02/linux-on-the-nuc-using-ubuntu-mint-fedora-and-the-steamos-beta

Edited February 2, 2014 by Turk

[calguyhunk]

One of the drawbacks of buying a barebones PC if you’re a Windows user ... you’ll have to pay somewhere in the neighborhood of $100 for a full OEM Windows license (and more if you want a retail version with tech support).

One of the advantages of buying a barebones PC if you’re a Windows user is that you'll not have to pay a dime for full OEM Windows. :showoff:

Fixed. :p

[Karlston]

Am seriously looking at the recently released Intel DN2820FYK NUC to be my next media player.

As soon as it supports install of OpenElec (an XBMC distro), that is. :)

It supports Windows 8.x, but not Windows 7 (drivers not available, but coming before mid-year).