Oct 30 2011

My Asus EEE has recently started acting up (I believe there might be some electrical problems), so I was on the market for a new laptop. I’m the kind of person to carry a laptop everywhere so the netbook concept really appealed to me — I honestly don’t use a computer for much more than coding, email, music, and web browsing, and keeping things lightweight helps a lot. I was looking for an Asus since I’ve had good experiences with them in the past and was pleased that the EEE came in a Linux-only version (driver support on the EEE was remarkably good for a laptop). Luckily the Zenbooks became available right as I started looking around and the hardware (specifically the UX21E) fit my needs.

While the Zenbooks are decent computers, Linux’s support for them is mediocre right now. This is due to two major factors: Sandy Bridge has a graphical architecture that slower distros don’t have support for yet, and Asus selected some hardware components that have poor support right now. Luckily, there seem to be few obstacles to a good user experience other than driver maturity, so someone looking to purchase a Zenbook to run an alternative OS may have better luck in a few months.

Here are a list of issues I’ve encountered, with solutions where I’ve found them:

• Working drivers for the ath9k chipset are available in the latest kernels, but not in the stock Debian Squeeze release. If you are installing Debian, I recommended doing a non net-install with a ‘standard’ ISO, transferring the sources for a newer kernel, building it, and switching to network repositories once wireless is working. The Arch Linux installer has working wireless drivers and I assume Ubuntu would as well. If you find yourself stuck in Debian without NetworkManager, you can bring up a network following the Arch installer instructions for set up wireless in the live environment (make sure you install wpa_supplicant from the ISO).

• The RFKill module has 3 on/off endpoints: PHY, Wireless, and Bluetooth. You will need to manually enable PHY in order to use wireless at all, I have a script which just enables everything at boot. I’ve put that up on a gist.

• There are some battery tweaks that suggest enabling ‘min_power’ for SATA power management. I saw errors pop up on dmesg when I enabled this; I can’t tell if they’re harmless or not but I felt it was prudent to leave it off.

• ACPI support and sensor information is limited. I had to manually place `acpi-cpufreq` and `coretemp` in `/etc/modules`, and the only readings I get are temperature. Battery discharge rate is available with `acpitool -B` but not in `gnome-power-manager`. This means one can get battery percentage estimates, but no time-till-empty estimates.

• The hotkey (function key) driver generally works OK (you can disable wireless, control volume etc.) but it has one annoying quirk: you can’t type an open parenthesis. To do so, you must type Fn-Shift-9 instead of simply Shift-9. I hope there is a tweak I can make to correct this somewhere.

• The trackpad is from a new, difficult to correctly spell manufacture called ‘Sentelic.’ The hardware supports two-finger scroll and multitouch, and the drivers (at least on 3.0.4) claim to as well, but somehow these don’t work when enabled. These appear to be driver-only issues, especially since they report ‘unexpected absolute data’ which is ignored. I can only assume these are the scroll events and simply aren’t handled yet. A much larger issue is the inability to (even temporarily) disable tap-to-click: these goes off while you are typing and makes it virtually impossible to correctly input text. There is a shell-based daemon someone wrote that I use now, I’ve modified it to use xinput to disable mouse input completely. It has a few issues, but I hope some driver enhancements come out to solve the problem more completely. In the meantime I’ve written a daemon to handle this much more smoothly.

• Graphics support, at least on Debian, is not good. Sandy Bridge has a new acceleration architecture which is available in newer Xorg setups, but not in the ones shipped with Squeeze. I may upgrade to Wheezy or put time in to install Arch just to get this. The most notable effects are comically slow screen refreshes and an inability to run dual-head. Again, if you use a newer distribution these issues may be resolved.

• Attempting to suspend the laptop results in a crash. I suspect this is related to the outdated drivers and perhaps a newer distro won’t see this issue. Luckily the laptop both boots and shuts down very quickly, but it is still very inconvenient.

• By default, the speakers are muted. Bring them up with `alsamixer` :).