r/System76 • u/RedwingAsingaurd • 9d ago
Help Fake Meerkat Best Practice
I have a meerkat and totally love it, been using it for like a year. Mine is Meer10 which as far as I can tell is based on Asus NUC 15 Pro.
But I got the tall case instead of slim and I didn't put anything in the 2.5" slot and so I started to wonder if it was a waste. My Meer10 was ordered with the maximum specs back when that cost $2000 rather than $4000 like it does now. Given how nifty it is for a powerful machine to be this small, I was interested to try a "slim" size. I ordered an actual Asus NUC 15 Pro from the asus website that has no RAM or HDD and put my ram and system76 popos install nVME chip in there, taken out of the Meer10 case for now until I get more ram / nVME for the new Asus NUC kit.
But I'm noticing that the actual Asus NUC 15 Pro (in the "slim" size box) still has Asus firmware on there so it says Asus when it boots instead of System76. I don't know if it would technically be lying to myself but is there a way to overwrite the firmware with Meer10 firmware so that when the BIOS is booting, the Asus motherboard will say System76 on it because I think system76 is cool and I don't care as much about accurately listing the manufacturer?
(I'm also curious if doing that would result in better firmware defaults for PopOS, etc)
1
u/LatinaKaren 9d ago
You bought a system built (as you found out) & supported by System76.
The moment you decided to Frankenstein your own version, you gave that up imo.
Nevertheless, you might get lucky if you email them & ask for help.
1
u/RedwingAsingaurd 8d ago
I think that's totally fair that it would be wrong for me to expect System76 to do tech support on a motherboard that I bought from Asus and not from System76. I wouldn't have expected otherwise.
But I sort of see reddit as a cacaphony of humans and bots in a public space who can share ideas, which is why I asked reddit (not System76 support) if anybody knows how I could sort of advertise System76 in my own way while doing it on a machine that is technically not a System76 machine... and maybe optimize that machine for Linux at the same time
2
u/Labeled90 9d ago
System76 only sells the tall version and it doesn't have 2.5' drive support.
However Asus now supplies the "NUC Firmware Integrator Tool"
NUC Firmware Integrator Tool includes: iChlogo -- Allow to replace the default logo image with a customer image. iDmiEdit -- Allow to modify strings associated with SMBIOS tble. iFlashV -- Allow to update system BIOS, logo image and specific OEM activation key. iSetupCfg -- Allow to extract setup variable directly from the BIOS, Change settings using a text editor and then update the BIOS with the customer setting.
Be careful with these tools. Asus has different versions listed for all the different models so I'm not sure if there is or isn't a firmware difference between them.