ASUS UL30A
About the laptop
- 13.3" LED Screen 1366 x 768.
- 4GB DDR3
- 1.3Ghz Dual core.
- 320GB HDD.
- 8-cell battery 84wh.
- HDMI
Compatibility
Everything in this laptop is Linux compatible, therefore you will not have any issues installing Linux. I recommend Xbindkeys for sound buttons. Every other fn-X button works. Suspend, wifi, brightness works. The video out button does not work, use xrandr instead. HDMI works as well. The battery is properly read. Use Laptop Mode Tools for power saving. You can run xorg without config file. xf86-video-intel is the package you need. I could not run x with vesa on this chipset, it just froze completely. HDMI and VGA out works, but not via fn-F8. You can use lxrandr, GUI for xrandr for setting up video out. You can make fn-f8 work by configuring Acpid.
Powersaving
See power saving.
Function keys
This computer has an extra power button on the left, you can configure this with Xbindkeys and run something useful. Like I use it for switching songs. The extra button is originally for powering up with Asus Express gate.
Freezes while/after booting
On my UL30A current Arch or Manjaro install will not boot (freeze somewhere along the process) unless I pass processor.nocst
as kernel parameter. This deactivates a certain APIC feature to determine the C-state but should not affect performance or stability since a legacy one is used instead. Do not forget to add that to your GRUB config afterwards as well.
Other things I pass to the kernel to improve battery life are nmi_watchdog=0
and pcie_aspm=force
. You have to see how well those work for you.
In general if you encounter freezes during boot APIC and ACPI should be looked into and deactivated if a solution cannot be found.