This is an old blog post I wrote back in March 2018, but I thought it might be worth posting again.
I recently bought a new tablet to use as a school computer. Because of this, I was aiming for something lightweight. I eventually picked the NuVision TM800W610L 8" Tablet for various reasons. Before I ordered it, I wanted to see if anyone had gotten Linux working on it. Sadly this video was pretty much all I could find. And, that video didn't paint too good of a picture for how well Linux works on it. After receiving this tablet and getting fed up with Windows 10, I decided I would challenge myself to get Linux working on it.
The first thing that you have to do is get into the BIOS. Luckily this is pretty easy, just plug in an external keyboard and mash the delete key while turning the tablet on.
The next step is a little bit harder. You have to get the tablet to recognize your bootable USB drive. On most computers this is pretty easy, but I found that even if I changed nothing, the tablet would randomly not recognize my USB drive as a valid boot option. So if that happens to you, my only advice at the moment is to keep trying, and maybe unplug everything then try again to make sure everything is seated correctly.
Now that we can boot into our distro of choice, we wanna get Wi-Fi working. It turns out that if you go through the BIOS you find out that this tablet has a BCM4356 Wi-Fi/Bluetooth card, which most distros don't ship with the proper firmware files for it to be useable. This took a lot of effort to figure out, but here we go:
If you run
dmesg | grep brcmfmac
you will probably see that if isn't able to find the firmware for the Wi-Fi chip. To fix this we need to give it the firmware. This has two different parts, if you get a message wanting brcm43430a0-sdio.bin do both parts, if it wants brcm43430a0-sdio.txt do the second part only.
To get this file download it from here.
The easiest way to get this file is to grab it from the stock Windows 10 install. Make a copy of C:\Windows\System32\drivers\43430r0nvram.txt on a USB drive or MicroSD card so that you can access it in the live USB and once you overwrite Windows and rename it to brcm43430a0-sdio.txt.
Once you have those two files you want to put them in /lib/firmware/brcm/ so you should have both /lib/firmware/brcm/brcm43430a0-sdio.bin and /lib/firmware/brcm/brcm43430a0-sdio.txt
Add fbcon=rotate:1 to grub boot option to set it to landscape with the USB port on the left, fbcon=rotate:3 for landscape with the USB port on the right. This will affect the TTY terminals.
You can also install arandr to easily set the rotation in Xorg manually.
So far I have only tested auto rotation on Fedora 27, but I found that it did automatically rotate the screen based on the orientation of the device, but it was off by 90 degrees clockwise. The simplest solution I have found so far is that under Gnome 3, if you click on the menu in the top right, one of the buttons at the bottom of the dropdown will lock the orientation. This will allow you to rotate the device without the screen changing.
I haven't fully tested this but so far running the following commands seemed to work
killall pulseaudio
pulseaudio --start
This will kill the current session of pulseaudio (which on Fedora 27 is started by gdm), then it will launch a new session that will be under your user.
So far this is the part that has given me the biggest headache. I have tried just about every command I have found to even get the built-in bluetooth adapter to show up under Linux. But, so far I haven't gotten them to show it. The easiest solution as of right now is to just plug in an OTG cable and then plug in a USB bluetooth adapter. At least under Fedora 27, it should be auto-detected and pretty much just work, as long as your adapter is supported under Linux.
This is just a typical install process. Although you may have trouble fitting both Linux and Windows on the internal 32 GB of storage, so you may want to try putting Linux on an SD card and putting GRUB onto the built-in storage if you want to dual-boot. You can also just wipe Windows 10 and install Linux over it if you wish.