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.
So which distribution did you use?
I’ve got Fedora 11 running on my Dell 1520 laptop, the only thing I’m having issue with at the moment is the touchpad doing a double tap to open files, etc.
I’m curious about this laptop. Is the 1.3Ghz low-power cpu noticeably slower with browsing and playing flash and doing high-ajax stuff under firefox? How about the webcam and battery life? Anything on those yet? Is wireless truly solid?
The 1.3 GHz does not seem slow for normal use, no. It’s perfectly fine for flash and ajax, at least any use I’ve put it to. It’s, so far, only slow for compiling.
That said, I doubt I’ll be able to do much in the way of gaming on this machine.
Battery life is good. I did a drain test, but it was invalidated (I found out after 4 hours) by having a zombie wine task (literally zombie; Plants Vs. Zombies) topping my wakups-per-second list consistently. I’ll do another drain test on monday.
I still have not tried the webcam again; without cheese I’m not sure how I’d try it, and it’s not high priority for me.
Wireless, on 2.6.32, is truly solid. No issues at all. I have not tried connecting to an N access point, since I don’t have one; but G is solid.
What distro are you running on it?
Does the distro recognize the webcam? I’d be interested to see if the latest Ubuntu recognizes it. You can try the live CD if you don’t have it installed.
I’ve got Ubuntu 9.10 installed on mine…everything working great…EXCEPT…the webcam is inverted in skype…
Otherwise as far as I can tell everything is working just fine
Have you tried to edit HD video 720p or 1080p using Kino/Cinelerra or other similiar non-linear video editing software? I’am curious how does CPU catch up. Interested to know if I’m able to process videos from my Canon 500D with Linux on Asus UL30A.
No, I haven’t tried to edit any video, and I wouldn’t have a source of HD video to edit. I would imagine it’s dog slow, since video editing should be comparable to compiling in terms of CPU usage (ie, completely CPU bound).
I got the same machine and i want to install lynux on it, but i am not sure if i should go for the ubuntu desktop or netbook remix. any ideas?
thanks
My wife and I recently purchased a UL30A-X5. Under Ubuntu 9.10 (Karmic), kernel 2.6.31, we indeed have poor wifi: slow speeds and dropped connections, whether using G or N routers.
We’ve installed the karmic backports from Synaptics. (There’s even a wireless backport.) But they didn’t help the wifi problems.
You say that 2.6.32 would fix the wifi, but I don’t see it in Synaptics. Can you or someone point me to how to try that kernel?
Another note: The spec at Amazon says “10/100 Fast Ethernet” but indeed lspci reports: “L1c Gigabit Ethernet Adapter” as you say. I haven’t tested the ethernet yet, so I wonder which it is, 100 or 1000 Mbs???
I build my own kernel from source, so I just upgraded it manually. I’m not sure where you’d get a 2.6.32 for karmic, but 2.6.32 definitely fixed my horrible wifi problems.
Unfortunately, mii-tool claims only 100Mbit:
[20:40 athena] bak> sudo mii-tool -v eth0
eth0: no link
product info: vendor 00:13:74, model 1 rev 11
basic mode: autonegotiation enabled
basic status: no link
capabilities: 100baseTx-FD 100baseTx-HD 10baseT-FD 10baseT-HD
advertising: 100baseTx-FD 100baseTx-HD 10baseT-FD 10baseT-HD flow-control
Mine is 1000, Gigabit ethernet. Yes, the webcam is inverted in cheese too. And the touchpad is not recognised so i cannot disable it while typing. Sound is great, battery I haven’t tested at all, but is more than my old laptop. And with ubuntu karmic 64 is pretty fast.
Same problem, webcam upside down, ubuntu karmic 64 bits, very fast.
@HS
Instructions for installing 2.6.32 here:
http://www.ramoonus.nl/2009/12/03/linux-kernel-2-6-32-installation-guide-for-ubuntu-linux/
Fixed my wireless problems with a UL30a
jcdoll,
Thanks. 2.6.32 installed like a charm.
It may have improved the wifi signal strength a bit, but I’m afraid it’s still not up to snuff. Most troubling is that nm-tool reports 54 Mb/s even when connected to an N router. When I dual boot, Windows 7 reports 150 Mb/s when connected to the same router.
Another troubling comparison is running nm-tool on the UL30A-X5 and also on an old Dell Latitutde D610 sitting next to it. The Asus picks up 14 wifi access points while the Dell picks up 25 access points.
Finally, I don’t know if this is significant or not but nm-tool on the Asus often reports “Capabilities: Speed: 1 Mb/s” even though the current (N) connection shows good Strength, say, 84. On the Dell I’ve never seen anything lower than 24 Mb/s when connected to the same router, showing also a (typical) strength of 84.
That kernel is not bad. I think it has improved my cpu. But the signal strength is very similar. The thing I would like to fix is the touchpad. Do anybody know a solution? The brightness can be fixed with a script in the ubuntu wiki.
Just an FYI: The ath9k driver isn’t really stable yet. That’s why you’re having wifi issues. You’ll get a lot more stability out of the driver if you force it to use 802.11abg and forget about 802.11n until they fix the problems.
@HS: 1mb/sec is what iwconfig will report when the ath9k driver has achieved an 802.11n connection. I don’t know why that is but if you query the driver directly in /sys (I forget the exact path) it will report a proper 802.11n speed (I usually see 130Mbps).
There’s a lot of active development going on with the ath9k driver right now so I suspect the problems with 802.11n will be solved in due time. Just be patient and stick with 802.11abg (no 802.11n) until they’re worked out.
For reference, the wifi hardware that utilizes ath9k is actually pretty sweet. The drivers just need some work (and they *are* working on it–trust me).
-Riskable
“I have a license to kill -9″
I am interested in this notebook, too. However, I am wondering about the display. Asus clames “Anti Glare”, but on photos of a different review it looks like your ordinary mirroring display every notebook has these days.
And, would you mind posting your .config?
About webcm flip problem, here is a solution:
http://radu.cotescu.com/2009/11/05/flipped-images-ubuntu-webcam/