Samsung ATIV Smart PC Pro (XE700T1C)
Replacing the SSD
The first thing I wanted to do with the device even before turning it on was to get Linux onto it. Since I also wanted to replace the 64GB SSD with a new 128GB one I thought the easiest approach would be to make an exact replica of my current laptop drive on the new SSD before putting it in and that way I'd have the OS installed with all my data on it as soon as I first powered it up. I had already bought an adapter to allow me to connect the mSATA SSD to USB just in case I had trouble booting the new system from USB and had no other option other than this method of installation, so I first copied my drive across with the dd command.
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The next step was to take the unit apart and replace the drive. I found a good video here which I followed and got it opened successfully in a few minutes. The guy in the video used a guitar pick, but I found a credit card was fine - one that had expired is best as you may damage the edges.
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Then for it to be able to boot into Linux you need to enter the BIOS configuration by pressing the F2 key when the unit is powered up, then disable the secure boot protocol and change from UEFI to CSM for OS mode. If you want to allow booting from USB drives you also need to disable the fast boot option in the advanced settings
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Touchscreen problem
Everything worked perfectly when the machine booted into Debian 7 except the touch screen. I know that it works because you can use it to configure the BIOS. I found by searching dmesg that it's an Atmel MaXTouch Digitizer and that there's a kernel module called atmel_mxt_ts that should handle it but even though it's being discovered as a USB device, it's not being connected to an input event or added into xorg.conf.
