Experiences with Asus UL30

[AXBX7C]

wow thx for all your tips! I'll try that battery capacity check...

I think the main reason to switch to Linux is a very supportive community. Just great how everyone helps each other. I never had this impression with the 'Windows community'...Awesome!

Regarding the WiFi adapter. I checked the energy consumption both with the adapter on and off and you're right, consumption is much lower when wifi is switched off! That tells me that the adpater is also disabled...

[Hobbes]

Thanks for the script/tips on power saving, I will give it a go. How are you measuring your power consumption btw?

[Cierreics]

Thanks for the script/tips on power saving, I will give it a go. How are you measuring your power consumption btw?

sudo apt-get install powertop

then

sudo powertop

On battery power, you'll see real-time power consumption.
Powertop also gives some tips, but don't follow them, some are deprecated....if you use my settings, the only tip you'll see is the min_power sata setting, and maybe the usb_autosuspend setting.
Don't follow them, usb is already autosuspending and the min_power sata setting brokes suspend to ram on Karmic...maybe it will be fixed in Lucid, but I found out that this setting don't reduce consumption at all, so it's pretty useless...

[Benoe]

Hi!

Do you think ASUS' Turbo33 feature will be available to ubuntu as well?

I think that feature only increases FSB. Is it possible under linux/ubuntu?

[Benoe]

Guys, with UL*0Vt!

I have read, that there is a way to enable the nVidia card during boot:

"go into your bios and set the hard disk to compatible mode.
boot into snow leopard, it will automagically uses the nvidia gpu."

It is from a hackintosh forum, but the situation might be the same with ubuntu.

[AXBX7C]

I'm wondering if there is any benefit from switching to a 64 Bit Linux version? Right now I'm using 9.10 (32 Bit) but I'm considering to switch with the new release... Even though, I'm not sure whether 1 GB more usable Ram would make any difference.

Anyone here who has a 64 Bit version installed on their Asus UL30a?

Thx for your thoughts!

[Cierreics]

I'm wondering if there is any benefit from switching to a 64 Bit Linux version? Right now I'm using 9.10 (32 Bit) but I'm considering to switch with the new release... Even though, I'm not sure whether 1 GB more usable Ram would make any difference.
Anyone here who has a 64 Bit version installed on their Asus UL30a?

Yes, I use a 64bit Karmic!

It works very well, the only thing I suggest is to install the alpha 64bit Flash player plugin: the 32bit version has too much crashes.
The alpha 64bit version works well, never crashes, but has problems in some fullscreen videos: on some platforms, like YouTube, when you use video controls on fullscreen mode, video becomes choppy and the system hangs fore some seconds, but on other platforms, like Megavideo, video controls work well even on fullscreen...

The 1 GB of ram you can get with a 64bit OS would not make much difference, unless you make heavy image or video editing, or 3d animations, but I don't think you're crazy enough to do that stuff on a 13.3" display...

Another way to fill 4GB of ram is to virtualize a Windows 7 machine giving it 3GB of ram...

[AXBX7C]

Hello!

I just upgraded to 10.04 but now my function keys are not working properly. I can't adjust my screen brightness. Also some function keys seem to activate two functions at the same time... Anyone else who's had the same problem?

Edit: I posted my issue to the general forum...

[IdealVithVodka]

Hi,

Yeah, I got the same problem with 10.04 on my UL30A... The keys don't work - but the wireless works without a problem I switched back to 9.10... I will wait till they sort out all of those issues...

BTW: someone told me that every release of ubuntu is made from scratch... Is the true ?? If so then the guys spend lots of time on resolving the same problems all the time... Or I'm wrong ?

the best way to check if they have done any progress with the keys would be to download the image in about 1 month and check if anything changed in the live session

[AXBX7C]

@IdealVithVodka:

There's a solution to the function key issue. See:

http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1466758

Someone said it didn't work for him but it did for me. So give it a try... On the other hand, if you have gone back to 9.10 you won't need it anyway....

Some also suggested that updating to a newer kernel would help:

Quote:
"After upgrading to some more recent kernel (.33, .34rc6 atm) all the
issues with non-working brightness controls / Fn keys were gone as well.
You can get recent kernel from the Mainline ppa:

http://kernel.ubuntu.com/~kernel-ppa/mainline/


As a sidenote, i think my battery lasts way longer with .34 - powertop
shows power draw below 6W sometimes. I never had such figures with
9.10 / kernel .31."
Unquote

I haven't tried that though...