My new Asus G1S /w Ubuntu
I bought an Asus G1S recently and it has been great.
At first I finished the setup of Windows Vista, which I have never used before, just for the experience.
I was disappointed to see a gaming laptop with a nVidia 8600M video graphics card, a 2.2GHz dual core cpu and 2 Gigs of RAM to get on its knees with this OS. In addition, I wonder what does an operating system do with 13 Gigs of hard disk.
Other than that, Vista was unable to play my .avi files directly (I had not downloaded any codecs :p ) and still have not figured out why it does not see any wireless network while I am not logged as ‘root’.
Generaly, I was frustrated most of the time. Still, I won’t format the Vista partition because I know that if Cedega fails, I will have to go back there to play games in a decent manner (or even play with DirectX10 Shaders a little bit :P…).
I went on to install Ubuntu Feisty Fawn with Gnome which I find rather minimalistic, but still great for my taste.
I had to do several things. At first, set up the same standard things (for which I should some time write a script) like network, repositories, codecs, players etc.
Then I went a little deeper, to the graphic drivers. Here, I have to admit that, I was expecting to face a dead end at some point before finaly making it (like always), but fortunately the Feisty wiki was more than helpful at this part too, and it took nothing more that a simple .dep download and a dpgk -i to have the official, latest nVidia drivers installed.
It was a great feeling, which I have not felt before, since my ATI Radeon card on the desktop pc was not that cooperative.
Anyway, since I got that running, I turned on the Ubuntu desktop effects and it nearly blow my mind to see window transparency, translucency and cube-like workspace switcher without Beryl or any extra effort whatsoever.
Then I setup my touchpad, that turned out to be rather easy as well, always following the Feisty wiki.
Still, I have yet to setup my onboard camera, microphone and wilreless (and the mouse sidebuttons :P).
It’s been great. The laptop seems very powerfull and I think I will be very pleased to program opengl on it…
Ubuntu setup takes time, especially for the things that do not work out of the box, but the road to success requires sacrifices, and also, I really really do not like Vista!
July 12th, 2007 at 8:50 am
Congrats for your new machine John. Wish you to get the best out if it!
July 16th, 2007 at 10:02 am
Congratulations !
I agree, G1S is a good laptop, and I do not like Vista.
I’m still have problem installing the nvidia driver…
I’ve try the last envy script, and the last nvidia installer, but I’m facing the “black screen” when gdm start(freeze with cpu max).
And, after installing the last ndiswrapper and xp driver, my wifi connection stop working after approximately 5mn.
I’m going to install again a fresh Feisty, because now, I know that it will work, without waiting for the new nvidia driver.
Wish you the best.
Thanks.
July 17th, 2007 at 8:46 am
Too bad that envy did not work for you. Keep trying though, I have a feeling that this particular thing has become rather easy to solve nowadays.
The other thing that I know will trouble me for quite sometime is the wireless, an Inter 4965 chipset. The ndsiwrapper did not do the trick for me the first two times i tried, but I will try again in due course….
The sad thing is that I do not have a wireless router to test, nor do I live in an area with other networks :P.
And I have the same problem with the bluetooth. I have not tried to make it work yet since I have no bluetooth devices lying around…
And last, but not least I have yet to see the webcam work… I know its lame but that is because I was doing something else…
I installed Transgaming’s Cedega successfully and started using it. I installed Civilization 4, which rocks!!, and I now spend hours playing after work. That unfortunately keeps me from taking care of the things mentioned above.
Anyway, I will surely update the thread once I got everything working…
August 26th, 2007 at 6:07 am
Hi folks, I was wondering if you could tell me what you used to load Ubuntu onto your G1S. I downloaded and burned the iso 7.04 desktop version and it doesn’t get past me hitting the “start/install” point without showing an error. I am not sure that it is recognizing the controller (i think that is the problem). Could you shed some light on this for me please. Thanks for the help.
August 26th, 2007 at 1:06 pm
Hi Greg
Try this link and tell me if it did any good!
I am working on a complete installation guide for Ubuntu on G1S but its still very rough, considering the fact that I have yet to install drivers for the wifi and camera [which works only with Ekega].
October 3rd, 2007 at 2:38 pm
I installed Gutsy beta, and now nvidia and wireless work perfectly out of the box !
The only thing I had to do was :
Desactivate the oled screen :
Compile the driver asusoled
https://launchpad.net/asusoled/
It works, but you need to rmmod usbhid, then I prefered to completly switch off at startup with this script :
################
#!/bin/sh
rmmod usbhid
/your_path/asusoled -d
modprobe usbhid
#################
And for the webcam :
# sudo apt-get install subversion
# svn checkout svn://svn.berlios.de/linux-uvc/linux-uvc/trunk linux-uvc
# cd linux-uvc
In the makefile change the INSTALL_MOD_DIR := ubuntu/media/usbvideo
# make
# sudo make install
It works in ekiga for example
October 19th, 2007 at 2:14 pm
I have written a guide for installing Linux on the Asus G1S. You can access it at:
http://www.linlap.com/wiki/Asus+G1S
June 6th, 2008 at 3:32 pm
I wrote a guide that has been posted on Linux on Laptops (http://www.linux-laptop.net/) for a while.
http://asusg1s.wikidot.com/ubuntu-7-10