After my previous laptop died after almost 5 years of loyal (ubuntu powered) service, I recently acquired an UX32VD and installed ubuntu 12.10 on it. Information from the wiki and these forums was invaluable, so thank you all who contributed.
Typing this post on Chromium, WiFi on, Bluetooth off, usb mouse plugged in and minimum screen brightness, battery reports around 4 hours of remaining power. Oscillating between 8 and 12W in powertop. This changes to about 3h20 of remaining battery life from a near full charge while watching video.
Current unresolved issues :
- Touchpad multi-touch gestures don't work : no two-finger scroll.
- Even when relatively idle, the laptop heats up to about 50°C, then the fan kicks in for a short while (not very loudly), brings back the temperature to about 46°C, after which it heats up again, etc.
- In Gnome Shell and Cinnamon, I'm getting very noticeable screen tearing when playing videos. This problem is completely absent with Unity. Funnily, I had the exact opposite problem with my previous laptop, where Unity had video tearing but not Shell/Cinnamon.
I wiped windows clean very shortly after booting up for the first time, so I'm not sure if some of these behaviors are flaws of the machine or ubuntu-specific.
If it might help anybody, and for my own future reference, I'll post a recap of everything I did (might be out of order) :
- Booted the installation from an USB key with Ubuntu 12.10 amd64 (F2 key for boot menu if I recall correctly)
- Deleted all partitions but the EFI one (as I'm unsure of what exactly is its purpose, I preferred to leave it alone).
- Chose a custom partition set up with / on the SSD (sdb), and /home (as well as /var, /tmp, /opt and swap) on the HDD (sda).
- Ran all the updates after installation.
- Followed the instructions in
this post to install a new kernel that solved the nonfunctional brightness keys. There are other workarounds listed on the wiki, but they didn't work for me and/or didn't seem to have the proper max brightness.
- Followed the instructions in
this post to solve the hard drive clicking sound problem.
- Followed the wiki recommendations on optimizing the SSD (adding discard,noatime,nodiratime to the /etc/fstab options)
- As recommended on the wiki, followed instructions from
this article to install Bumblebee.
- Followed the instructions from
this post to turn off the Nvidia card at boot.
- Followed the instructions from
this post to blacklist the card reader driver, in order to save battery power (I'm not using it).
- Added xorg-edgers PPA in the hope of fixing the touchpad multi-touch, which it didn't, but it seemed to solve the occasional black screen or kernel panic at boot I previously encountered (completely unsure about this).
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