Linux on Asus UL30A-X5
Well, I got a new laptop about a week and a half ago, and I already love it. It’s small, light, cool, and has a huge battery life, even in Linux, even with my normal usage. It works extremely well out of the box, as well. Here’s the specs:
- 1.3 GHz Intel Core2Duo SU7300
- 4GB of RAM
- 500G 5400 RPM HD
- 13.3″ 1366×768 LED backlit screen
- Intel GMA 4500MHD GPU
- Atheros AR9285 802.11n WiFi
- Atheros AR8132 / L1c Gigabit Ethernet
- Chicony 0.3 M webcam
- Intel ICH9 HD audio
- Elantech multi-touch touchpad
First impressions: The screen is bright. Wow, the screen is bright. I generally have to run it a <50% brightness. Makes me wonder if it’s visible in sunlight; since it’s winter, I don’t know yet. It’s quite slow, compared to my previous laptop. Or rather, it takes a long time to compile things, because it doesn’t feel any slower to use. If anything, it feels somewhat faster; presumably, this is due to twice as much RAM that is much faster, and a much better GPU. The keyboard is nice, the touchpad is great (although it’s very slightly in the wrong place, meaning you hit it with your palm while typing; more later), the speakers are way too quiet.
On to the real meat of the question: Linux support. In general, everything works great. Here’s the details.
Video
This works fine with xorg 1.7.3 and xf86-video-intel 2.9.1. Screen brightness works, both via Fn keys and software. KMS also works fine. The backlight doesn’t come back on after resume (and I haven’t set up acpid yet to fix that) but a quick chvt works fine to get it back. HDMI out works (although I wasn’t able to get full 1080p on my quick test with my TV; I’ll try on a monitor later). Dual head via HDMI also works fine via xrandr. I can render 720p video fine, without kicking out of low CPU frequency. I haven’t tried 1080p, since the screen doesn’t go that high.
Network
Both the GigE and WiFi work fine; the GigE uses the atl1c driver, and the WiFi uses the ath9k driver. A word of warning, tho: use 2.6.32 or higher, or the WiFi get poor reception and constantly roams to a non-existent base station, causing your network connection to cycle up and down constantly. With 2.6.32, it works fine.
Touchpad
The touchpad is detected as a mouse, and handled by evdev, even with the Elantech driver built into the kernel. Since two-finger scroll and multi-finger tap work out of the box (even without the Elantech driver), I haven’t investigated why yet. I would guess that hal is mis-diagnosing it, and loading evdev rather than synaptics. I’m planning on looking into this soon.
Edit: The driver in the kernel doesn’t recognize this as a touchpad, so it runs in ImPS/2 compatibility mode. This is usable, annoying, since nothing is configurable. Ubuntu bug.
Audio
Audio works fine with the intelhda driver. Full volume control, headphone, etc. The speakers on this thing are way to quiet. You can’t use them to play video for 2 people to watch. Since I didn’t play much with Windows, I’m not sure if it’s a hardware thing, or if I’m missing some “make it loud” setting. The headphones are plenty loud, so that’s okay. I mostly use headphones anyway.
Webcam
This may or may not work. I added the driver that’s supposed to work (uvc) but when I tried to run cheese, it crashed. I haven’t tried any further at this point, so it may work. The USB ID isn’t the same as the ones listed, so it may not work.
Battery Life
This is the big one. Size/weight and battery life are why I got this laptop in the first place, so it better be good, right? Well, it is. I haven’t done a full battery drain test (well, I’m doing it right now), but I’ve gotten 5 hours with space left, and I watched 2 hours of 720p HD video with ~50% left. When you first unplug, g-p-m claims 10.1 hours left, but that’s a damn lie, of course. I’ll have to do a good powerdrain run.