Arch Linux on an Asus Zenbook UX31E

Arch/Linux specific:

• The most annoying issue is that if I have an HDMI device plugged in at boot, which I usually do at home, then the laptop screen will not come on. Possibly related to issues I have unplugging HDMI.
• Adding i915.i915_enable_rc6=1 to you kernel boot options can result in considerable cooling and power savings. This Ubuntu article recommends disabling VT-d in the BIOS. Shutdown issues have been fixed in Kernel 3.3-rc6.
• UEFI: The boot menu seems to be on the last page of the BIOS setup page. This doesn't seem to be automatically populated beyond a single item for each boot partition, presumably booting /efi/boot/bootx64.efi, but you can add your own boot item by manually entering the path. If you always want to boot into grub, and use grub's own boot menu, then copy grub.efi to the above file.
• The Grub2/Asus UEFI issue seems to have been fixed by 2.00 Beta 2, 21 March 2012.
• The Sentelic touchpad works out of the box, but to get scrolling etc working use Saaros's patch. Recompiling the kernel with this patch is fairly straight forward if you follow the instructions carefully. I have to say that with the patch, the pad seems less accurate and tapping seems slightly less sensitive (or maybe just slower?), which is a shame.
• Sleep/suspend to RAM works if you add xhci_hcd, ehci_hcd and uhci_hcd to SUSPEND_MODULES.
• The function keys (mute, volume, brightness) either work out of the box(!) or carried on working from when I'd set them up for my X220.
• Brightness adjustments made using the keyboard do not get reflected in /sys/class/brightness, but this is being fixed.
• Battery life seems pretty amazing, at 5-6 hours, even under Linux.
  

General:

• Cheekily Asus advertise the disk capacities as 64G/128G/256G, when, as they are SandForce based drives, they will actually be 60G/120G/240G.
• The keyboard is not great, to say the least. Some of the keys do not register if you do not press them dead centre, however the trackpad is actually quite good as far as I am concerned.
• The screen is quite cold/blue. There is a UX31E ICC profile on this review. You can use xcalib to load it in Linux, although it does make the top right hand corner a little green for me, so I am currently using the UX21E version.
• The audio is excellent, for a laptop. Although the balance is off on mine.

Windows:

• Install the ATK/ACPI driver first. This is buried deep in the utilities section of the Asus download page.
• If your machine wakes immediately after sleeping then you need to install the Power Option utility.

Arch Linux on a Thinkpad X220

Some thoughts on Arch Linux on the X220:

• Adding i915.i915_enable_rc6=1 to you kernel boot options can result in considerable cooling and power savings (and possible unwanted shutdowns?)
• The screen brightness jumps to full after certain ACPI events, such as at startup and lid open. I haven't fully solved this but have added xbacklight -set 80 to my .xinitrc.
• Occasionally when I connect to power, yacpi reports a maximum CPU frequency of 800MHz. I haven't been able to reliably recreate or investigate.
• Volume/Mute buttons work with xbindkeys, though I haven't got the mic mute to work yet even with Corubba's udev keymap suggestion below. Also if the machine is muted at boot the mute toggle doesn't work. (Windows seems to exhibit similar behaviour.)
• For right and middle click on the Touchpad install xf86-input-synaptics-clickpad. You can also configure XOrg for tapping the corners.
• I haven't properly measured battery life, but it's estimated at around five hours with my standard 6 cell pack, which isn't bad, and is similar to the Windows estimate.
• If your machine reboots after shutdown add rmmod ehci_hcd to rc.local.shutdown.
• If your machine pauses at shutdown with e1000e 0000:00:19.0: eth0: Could not acquire PHY then add rmmod e1000e to rc.local.shutdown.
• Power button to power off instructions here. Note that you have to hold the power button down for three seconds until the machine beeps. Note also that I couldn't get the "first solution" on that page to work, but the second does.
  
• If udevd times out (after 30 seconds) at boot then try adding your wireless driver (eg rtl8192ce) to MODULES in rc.conf.

I've had a bit of an adventure with wireless, so I thought I'd give it its own section:

• I made the mistake of not paying £3 to upgrade the wireless to Intel and got the RealTek 8188ce card by default. The kernel driver doesn't seems fine. that great, use the RealTek driver or better, the AUR package (currently neither is available for 3.1).
• As I found out to my cost, the Thinkpad BIOS has a whitelist of wireless cards, and if yours doesn't match then your machine won't even boot, even if it is a genuine Intel Centrino Advanced-N 6200. However there are plenty of modded BIOSes out there, although not necessarily quite up to date. Try googling your model number + "whitelist". I got my X220 BIOS here.
  
• Oddly, after installing the 6200 my machine started suspending twice when I closed the lid, fixed by adding the following line to /etc/acpi/actions/lm_lid.sh
  

  if [[ `cat /proc/acpi/button/lid/LID/state | awk '{print $2}'` = "closed" ]]

• Disappointingly the Intel card doesn't seem any better than the RealTek, not connecting as fast as the RealTek did with the Aur driver and it didn't cure my disconnection issues. They seem to have been cured by flashing our Virgin provided D-Link DIR-615 with dd-wrt.
  

See also my post on the X220 and booting GPT drives.

A note for Windows 7 - don't install the Intel HD graphics driver before Windows SP1 or you'll get a blue screen.

Linux on Dell's M101z

I've now installed and configured both Ubuntu and Arch on my Dell M101z and most things work fine. Starting at the bottom:

• The M101z does not allow hot swapping of the internal hard drive, perhaps obvious as it really is internal (you have to remove the keyboard to change it) but it did mean that I was lucky I still had my old M1330 which allowed for hot-swapping to update the firmware on my OCZ Vertex 2.
• Suspend (s2ram) works as long as you boot with the noapic kernel option and don't have an HDMI device connected when you suspend/resume.
• For wireless I've been using the open source brcm80211 driver it seems more reliable on speed and is built into the kernel since 2.6.37, but it's a little bit buggy. Broadcom's own STA driver is stable, but seems very slow at times.
• Just because the Radeon HD 4225 video card has an "HD" in the name does not mean that you should use the RadeonHD driver as I tried to under Arch, use the straight ATI/Radeon driver as Ubuntu does automatically. Use Arch wiki's xorg.conf settings. I wouldn't recommend the binary driver either.
• CPU scaling works using the PowerNow-K8 module, again I assume Ubuntu did this automatically.
• /dev/sdb1 is not created when I insert an SD card. I can create it either by rmmod and modprobe ehci_hcd or attempting to mount /dev/sdb.

It seems like a good little machine, the keyboard's good (I don't have small hands), it's heavier than it looks, the screen is good, it runs quite hot and I'm a little disappointed with the 3-4 hour battery life, I wonder if it would be better under Windows.