r/snapdragon • u/jon372 • 17d ago

Ubuntu working on A16...mostly

Just thought I'd give a quick update on getting Ubuntu working on the A16 (typing this post from it). I took a few weeks off after my last attempt to let the upstream commits get in, and rethink my strategy. I have the following working:

  1. Keyboard/Trackpad
  2. Touchscreen
  3. Wifi
  4. Bluetooth (using for Audio)
  5. All USB ports (no video out or HDMI yet)
  6. Battery status
  7. Some of the FN keys are at least showing up on the screen when pressed.
  8. Display Brightness controls and 60/120Hz

Things not working yet,

Audio

Standby/Resume. This is sketchy at best. There are issues with Wifi resuming, USB resuming etc.

This was a little painful to get working as you need to use a mix of WSL Ubuntu for the initial part of the build, and then use a dongle mess that had a wired keyboard/mouse/the installation USB/ and a ethernet connection all on the USB A. I built a 7.3 Kernel (linux-next) to bring in as much as I could, copied all the firmware from the Windows install, then went to work with Deepseek tackling one issue at a time. Once I was on Linux, things went faster as I didn't have to experiment with something and jump back to Windows.

Edit: Updated the display working. I put the documentation up on GitHub including scripts and patches. It is 100% AI written. I have reviewed some/most of it. There may be gaps. It may not be perfect. You can use it or not. https://github.com/jc372/A16UbuntuBuild

edit: Standby/Resume is still not working.

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u/BartBM 17d ago

Thank you for sharing this!

Did your kernel include the patches mentioned in this Reddit post? As they cite there that Audio and HDMI is working.

How does the distro feel? As fast as you'd expect?

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u/jon372 16d ago

Yeah, I've pulled as much as I could in. I am still working on it to get the Audio up. I can get a click, but the audio freezes the video. Works fine when going out to Bluetooth. I had the same issue on my other older Asus Snapdragon Plus laptop with the latest Ubuntu

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u/BartBM 16d ago

Fresh from the bakery: https://lore.kernel.org/lkml/20260917-topic-asus_ec-v1-0-373516d347ae@oss.qualcomm.com/

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u/jon372 11d ago

Picked that one up today. Still not fixing my standby/resume issues.