ASUS ROG G73 and Ubuntu

[jas]

Thanks again ALLurGroceries. That did it.

On my system I have the following directory;

/sys/class/leds/asus::kbd_backlight/

which is a symlink to

/sys/devices/platform/asus_laptop/leds/asus::kbd_backlight/

so if, as root, I issue a;

echo 0 > /sys/class/leds/asus::kbd_backlight/brightness

it's the same as

echo 0 > /sys/devices/platform/asus_laptop/leds/asus::kbd_backlight/brightness

and it turns off the keyboard backlighting. As you pointed out, echoing a 1 turns the backlight on at the lowest brightness, 2 turns it higher, with 3 being the brightest.

Good Luck..

[ALLurGroceries]

Yes 'tis quicker your way, I pasted that long line in from a script in my /home, I try to not have to type that very often...

[AnasSum]

Originally Posted by _WiLloW_

Hi xucchini.

Apparently all components are recognized perfectly.
Have you noticed any problem under GNU/Linux?

Another question:

Does the G73jh support "Dolby Home Theater" and "Dolby Digital Live" under Windows?

No, I don't think so. Asus used RealTek's ALC269, which seems to only support stereo out (but it does DD/DTS passthrough so movies are OK if you have a receiver). There is no DD live/DTS connect option in the RealTek audio manager.

Basically this means you can't get surround in games that use EAX instead of DD or DTS, which is completely unacceptable for a "gaming" laptop. Judging from this boneheaded decision, who knows, maybe Asus will try to get away with an intel integrated graphics chipset instead of a real video card in their next "gaming" laptop. I only got the g73 because all the other companies made even dumber design decisions (i.e. pairing i7s and blu-ray with low-res screens and mid-range graphics cards) or charged $1000 more.

Ranting aside, I'm going to try a $60 USB "x-fi" to plug in 5.1 analog speakers. It's not really an x-fi because it makes the software do all the work, but it will let me plug in analog 5.1. Hopefully it solves the problem.

[tmt345]

@jas or whoever

so if i were to install ubuntu 10.04 when it comes out the drivers should work on the g73jh? it sounds like your saying that the opensource drivers will work better, how will i know when these drivers are released and will they be easy to install if i already have the proprietary drivers installed? will ubuntu alert me?

i'm kind of a linux noob but after all these years its finally starting to be user friendly, as in never having to open the terminal or anything.

EDIT: oh and define "tweaking" please, was that hard for you to do and how did you do it?

thanks

[jas]

For Ubuntu, this Gentoo Forum post describes how the Ubuntu devs have included the 10.4 beta driver with daily builds of Ubuntu 10.04 LTS (Lucid Lynx), here. I would think that the final release would include if not the 10.4 beta driver, then the 10.4 release driver from ATI. If anyone is curious there's a long howto for installing both open source, as well as proprietary ATI drivers under Ubuntu at the Unofficial ATI Driver Wiki, here.

In this Gentoo forum thread, the subject of installing the 10.4 beta fglrx driver is discussed, and in my post here, I described in detail how I configured my kernel, xorg.conf, and installed both the 10.4 beta driver, as well as a patched xorg-server 1.8.0, (in order to work with the driver). That's what I meant by tweaking.

Actually the reason I'm looking forward to using the open source "radeon" driver on this laptop, has nothing to do with any perceived functionality, but rather that it's truly an open source driver, (unlike the ATI fglrx, or nVidia Linux driver). The reason that I went with ATI equipped laptops, is because ATI has an open source driver initiative, which has nothing to do with driver functionality, but everything to do with support of open source values. The downside is that the closed source, or proprietary, drivers usually provides better performance and/or more functionality, so those choosing the open source driver, tend to have to wait longer to get the same features. So for many, the "better" driver is the closed source one.

However, for the 5000 series GPUs, today there's no choice. You need to use either the ATI fglrx driver, or a standard vesa driver, until the radeon driver development, catches up. When that driver is released, it will be combined with an Linux kernel update , and with Ubuntu, it will probably be released as a new version of Ubuntu.

Good Luck..

[tmt345]

thank you for the great response. i am looking forward to thursday when i can finally ditch windows 7! i used to have an imac and i was looking for an apple laptop but the performance to price ratio has gone down even more this past year or so with apple... you can buy a laptop for half the price with the same specs! a couple of years ago the macbook pro was the fastest WINDOWS laptop available, apple has clearly stopped caring about its computer division.

i still have to use windows 7 for games, which has been terribly annoying this past week because of how flashy and crowded the OS feels. microsoft really needs to steal some more stuff from mac and linux! after getting everything installed and after a week of owning it the startup time has already gotten worse... windows has got to be the ONLY os that does that!

/vent

[ALLurGroceries]

Over this past weekend I wrote a handler for the keyboard backlight hotkeys. It's called asuskledd (ASUS KLED Daemon). All it does is run in the background and let you change the keyboard brightness with Fn+F3 and Fn+F4.

[jas]

I compiled from source on my system, and it works perfectly on my G73Jh with;

Gentoo 64bit 2.6.33-r1 Kernel
glib-2.22.5
dbus-1.2.24
dbus-glib-0.86

It's strange to have perfectly working keyboard illumination under Linux, when so many are having problems with it under Windows...

Thanks Allur!!

[_WiLloW_]

Originally Posted by ALLurGroceries

All it does is run in the background and let you change the keyboard brightness with Fn+F3 and Fn+F4.

Thanks, but we already have a daemon to handle ACPI events: acpid

For Ubuntu users, just extract attached file in /etc/acpi and then:

sudo chmod +x /etc/acpi/asus-kb-*
sudo restart acpid

Edit: NotifyOSD version added

[ALLurGroceries]

Originally Posted by _WiLloW_

Thanks, but we already have a daemon to handle ACPI events: acpid

That's cool, but your scripts only work when I add this to line 4 of -up and -down:

STATUS=$(($STATUS % 128))

Edit: This is why:

echo 1 > /sys/class/leds/asus\:\:kbd_backlight/brightness 
cat  /sys/class/leds/asus\:\:kbd_backlight/brightness 
129
echo 2 > /sys/class/leds/asus\:\:kbd_backlight/brightness 
cat  /sys/class/leds/asus\:\:kbd_backlight/brightness 
130
echo 3 > /sys/class/leds/asus\:\:kbd_backlight/brightness 
cat  /sys/class/leds/asus\:\:kbd_backlight/brightness 
131
echo 0 > /sys/class/leds/asus\:\:kbd_backlight/brightness 
cat  /sys/class/leds/asus\:\:kbd_backlight/brightness 
0

Here are the scripts with that modification, posted plaintext so that you don't have to register to download an attachment:

/etc/acpi/asus-kb-brightness-up.sh

#!/bin/bash

STATUS="`cat /sys/devices/platform/asus_laptop/leds/asus::kbd_backlight/brightness`"

STATUS=$(($STATUS % 128))

if [ $STATUS -lt 3 ] ; then
	((STATUS++))
	echo $STATUS > /sys/devices/platform/asus_laptop/leds/asus::kbd_backlight/brightness
fi

exit 0

/etc/acpi/asus-kb-brightness-down.sh

#!/bin/bash

STATUS="`cat /sys/devices/platform/asus_laptop/leds/asus::kbd_backlight/brightness`"

STATUS=$(($STATUS % 128))

if [ $STATUS -gt 0 ]; then
	((STATUS--))
	echo $STATUS > /sys/devices/platform/asus_laptop/leds/asus::kbd_backlight/brightness
fi

exit 0

/etc/acpi/events/asus-kb-brightness-down

event=hotkey (ATKD|HOTK) 000000c5
action=/etc/acpi/asus-kb-brightness-down.sh

/etc/acpi/events/asus-kb-brightness-up

event=hotkey (ATKD|HOTK) 000000c4
action=/etc/acpi/asus-kb-brightness-up.sh

Take care.