Comment 62 for bug 1040557

Just to add to this, I installed without issue last night on an NP530U3C-A04UK in the following manner:

* Booted first time into Windows, found that Fastboot was already disabled (new Ultrabook in sealed box) and disabled Intel Smart Response (the SSD caching).
* Updated the BIOS immediately to P08AAJ via the updater on Samsungs support site. System rebooted back into Windows.
* Shutdown, inserted USB stick with 12.04.1 amd64 "alternate" and started up again, hammering F2 as I power on. From what I see the Desktop installer is part of the problem, so avoid it.
* Double checked that Fastboot was disabled, and BIOS boot was already set to Legacy instead of UEFI. Set the USB stick to the top of the boot order.
* Save settings and exit, and it'll boot the installer from the USB stick.

You don't *need* to do anything special during the install, everything worked smoothly and was very, very fast. I did it in the following way:

sda is the HDD (grub on MBR)
/boot - 300MB ext3
[ within "hdd" LVM group -
swap - 8GB (only got 6GB in the system, but will upgrade to 8GB and will want to try hibernation at some point. On the HDD to preserve the SSD lifetime)
/home - all free space ext4
- within LVM ]
hidden NTFS - ~23GB (I kept this in case I need to recover Windows 7 when I sell it some years down the line)

sdb is the SSD
[ within "ssd" LVM group -
/ - 24GB ext4
- within LVM ]

When you boot the first time into Ubuntu, don't mess with anything. Just take it through a full update and don't mess with anything. For example, I messed with the brightness hotkeys on the keyboard, which hardlocked the machine. If you do that you might have just wasted ~20 minutes. Just leave it and try it when you've updated and rebooted. It'll work fine then.

Suspend on lid close works fine too. I noticed the machine didn't wake up when I opened the lid, but I'm not too bothered about that when pressing the power button de-suspends it just fine. I've yet to get around to enabling hibernation and trying it, but I'll let you guys know when I do.

I'd suggest sticking with 12.04.1 for this model to be honest, as battery life clocks in at around ~5 hours from what I understand, which isn't fantastic but isn't entirely poor either. 12.10 is running a 3.5.x series kernel which is suspected to have several kernel power regressions which can cut up to an hour off your precious 5 hour battery life in certain circumstances. If you don't specifically need 12.10, steer clear on mobile devices until you hear of the issues being traced, patched and fixes pushed out.

All in all, I'm very impressed with this machine!

angarciaba, I'm not sure that the machines even do an automatic BIOS upgrade. I upgraded mine manually within Windows 7 before I would even attempt to install Ubuntu.