My friend installed ubuntu 9.10 on his ASUS UL80 and there are problems with wifi. It keeps disconnecting every ~3 minutes. And battery life is realy poor in comparison to windows, it stays up for about 3 - 4 hours. So it sucks pretty much.
Would be possible (would someone be able) to write a script that makes the switch ?
1 - change xorg.conf videocard to use
2 - notify (ubuntu-notification) user that "next login will make use of XXX videocard"
2 - at next xorg startup, power off the discrete videocard if the integrated is used
For the point 2 : would be possible to power off the card using the same mechanism issued by the suspend system ?
If this is possible... well, we could get reasonably good features, and a mere re-logon is quite acceptable...
(I'm thinking to buy an UL30VT...)
You may be able to go into device manager (right click my computer and click properties then hit the hardware tab then click device manager) and under the "display" section, right click and select "disable" for the onboard video.
For those considering an Asus UL80Vt or UL30Vt, even if the BIOS doesn't specify an option to switch on/off the discrete graphics card, there is still an alternative in Linux, which is to use grub2-efi. It's been done for other linux hybrid graphics laptops (e.g. apple macbooks, sony vaio z-series, etc.) and it's in active development.
http://grub.enbug.org/TestingOnEFI
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=995704
There are several Linux users investigating with these kind of laptops, so it is reasonable to expect this feature to appear soon for Asus UL30/UL80 laptops.
Has anyone opened it up and seen if you can physically disable the nvidia card (ie remove a daughter board)?
Thinking of buying ul30vt or ul80vt, are there any other issues? does multi touch work? can you overclock it in Linux?
Last edited by fungi; December 5th, 2009 at 03:00 PM. Reason: add overclock question
OK i've ordered the ul30vt.
See now that it comes with splashtop (express gate linux). Could somebody test the battery life under express gate and see what kind of battery performance that delivers?
If splashtop is disabling the nvidia graphics chip it may hold clues as to how we can disable it in ubuntu.
Damn! I´ve also ordered a VT but i´m getting more and more uncertain the more i read about the graphics problems!
I really think the Nvidia card is a better choice, but i´d love the possibilituy to choose between that one and the Intelcard when i´m not doing any graphic intensive tasks....
I´m a photographer so i think i´d get more from the lappy with the Nvidia card..
What should i do!? =(
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