ASUS U36SG Review / Setup

After 2 years 11 months I decided it was time to upgrade my aging Macbook Pro to something a bit newer and less Appley (no ethernet port on a "pro" laptop - are they having a laugh?! Bring back Steve!). I bought the ASUS U36SG from Amazon. I had free money to spend on Amazon, and it was  £120 cheaper than ebuyer! The other reason I had to upgrade now was the fear of being shoved in the direction of the hideous monstrosity that is Windows 8. Yeah I'm a Linux user, but if I'm forced to buy a Windows COA you can be damn sure it aint going to be for Win8.

http://uk.asus.com/Notebooks/Superior_Mobility/U36SG/

This had everything I was looking for (except a backlit keyboard, but still...)

The packaging was shoddy, I guess I've been too spoilt by Apple. It came in a messy looking box, and inside was just some wonky brown cardboard holding it all together. Two things I noticed that I liked, and two that I didn't:

1. Hard drive LED! We buy Lenovo at work, and the lack of a HDD LED bugs me
2. You can make the "restore DVDs" straight to ISO, no need to waste real life discs (who uses them anymore?) - again, Lenny doesn't offer this feature. Before someone goes "Herp derp Y U make restore discs when you use linux LOL!!!!11111oneone" - in case I sell it in the future. in case it needs to be sent back under warranty.

And the bad stuff:

1. The damn stickers! stuck all over the thing. Protective plastic. spam stickers. ugh. Luckily they all came off OK. There were sneaky ones on the underside of the hinges I didn't spot first time round:

2. As with my last ASUS (EEEPC900A - a netbook, remember those?!) there's no indicator LED to say the battery is finished charging. You've actually got to start it up and check in the OS. I don't get why they would miss off something as simple as that. The manual says when its on green and solid, its at least nearly fully charged - well thats useful.... NOT


Anyway, after making the restore discs (5 DVD ISOs - yep, that's (compressed) 17GB of crap they pile on to these things), it got flattened and a clean Windows 7 x64 installed. Seemed daft not to dual boot, in case there's a game I want to play that WINE doesn't like or something.

I like the ASUS driver page, they give the downloads meaningful names (*cough* TAKE NOTE DELL *cough*)

After taking a disk image, it was time for Linux. Arch went on without issue. Notes below. The only thing that took a little set up was the dual graphics card nvidia Optimus thingy using 'Bumblebee'. It worked first time though.

Arch installation:

loadkeys uk

cfdisk /dev/sda

mkfs.ext3 /dev/sda2

mount /dev/sda2 /mnt

pacstrap /mnt base base-devel

pacstrap /mnt grub-bios

genfstab -p /mnt >> /mnt/etc/fstab

arch-chroot /mnt

    nano /etc/hostname

    nano /etc/hosts

    nano /etc/vconsole.conf

        KEYMAP=uk

        FONT=

        FONT_MAP=

    nano /etc/locale.gen

    locale-gen

    nano /etc/locale.conf

        LANG=en_GB.UTF-8

    mkinitcpio -p linux

    grub-install --recheck /dev/sda

    pacman -S os-prober

    grub-mkconfig -o /boot/grub/grub.cfg

    passwd root

    exit

umount /mnt

reboot

Installed:

vim

cpupower lm_sensors wireless_tools yajl

alsa-utils alsa-oss alsa-plugins

netcat mpg123 wget

wicd
    gpasswd -a USERNAME network
    /etc/rc.conf    DAEMONS= dbus wicd
dhclient

(I had to install dhclient - wicd seemed unhappy with the Arch default of dhcpcd)

Fix the grub error message:

# cp /usr/share/locale/en\@quot/LC_MESSAGES/grub.mo /boot/grub/locale/en.mo

Installed Xorg and stuff:

xorg-server xorg-xinit xorg-server-utils mesa mesa-demos xf86-input-synaptics xf86-video-intel openbox rxvt-unicode feh

~/.xinitrc

    exec openbox-session

Installed yaourt to get bumblebee:

$ wget http://aur.archlinux.org/packages/package-query/package-query.tar.gz
$ wget http://aur.archlinux.org/packages/yaourt/yaourt.tar.gz
$ tar xvzf package-query.tar.gz
$ tar xvzf yaourt.tar.gz
$ cd package-query
$ makepkg
# pacman -U package-query-1.0.1-x86-64......
$ cd yaourt
$ makepkg
# pacman -U yaourt-blahblah......

Installed bumblebee and stuff, tested with glxgears:

yaourt -S bumblebee
yaourt -S nvidia-utils-bumblebee nvidia-bumblebee
    /etc/rc.conf   DAEMONS=bumblebeed

glxgears
optirun glxgears

Installed bbswitch to save power and turn off the nvidia card when not in use:

yaourt -S bbswitch

/etc/bumblebee/bumblebee.conf

    [bumblebeed]
    KeepUnusedXServer=false
    TurnCardOffAtExit=false
    ...
    [driver-nvidia]
    PMMethod=bbswitch
    ...
    [driver-nouveau]
    PMMethod=bbswitch
    ...

/etc/modprobe.d/bbswitch.conf
    options bbswitch load_state=0 unload_state=0

# rc.d restart bumblebeed


/etc/rc.d/functions.d/nvidia-card-enable
#############################
nvidia_card_enable() {
  BBSWITCH=/proc/acpi/bbswitch

  stat_busy "Enabling NVIDIA GPU"

  if [ -w ${BBSWITCH} ]; then
    echo ON > ${BBSWITCH}
    stat_done
  else
    stat_fail
  fi
}

add_hook shutdown_poweroff nvidia_card_enable
#############################

chmod +x /etc/rc.d/functions.d/nvidia-card-enable

Rebooted, and tested the power saving (it's off when it shows rev as FF)

lspci|grep VGA
    (rev ff)
optirun glxgears
lspci|grep VGA
    (rev a1)

Installed laptop-mode-tools to stop the drive from using whatever power saving settings it has as default (which makes it click every few seconds as it's too aggressive):

laptop-mode-tools
    /etc/rc.conf    DAEMONS= laptop-mode
    /etc/laptop-mode/laptop-mode.conf
        #
        # Power management for HD (hdparm -B values)
        #
        BATT_HD_POWERMGMT=128
        LM_AC_HD_POWERMGMT=254
        NOLM_AC_HD_POWERMGMT=254

...and that was it really. I'm yet to test suspend and bluetooth, but they should just work.