John Heidemann / Other Stuff / Free Unix / Free Unix on ASUS UX31E

I recently purchased a ASUS UX31E to run Fedora Linux (F16). (Although I had a very happy 3.5 years with my Lenovo X200s, I wanted to try out the new ultrabooks.)

Pros:

Cons:

Reflecting on things after several months of use.

So I would not buy another of this model. And, near as I can tell, all Ultrabooks currently have 4GiB of RAM. So we’ll have to wait for the next generation. Sigh.

And after eight months of use: I moved to a Lenovo X1 Carbon. I found the keyboard on the ASUS really hard to type on, and the SSD would “thrash”, basically locking up the system for up to 5 minutes in I/O intensive tasks. The disk problem was exasperated by the relatively small RAM requiring the system to swap. Hopefully the Carbon will address these problems.

Linux

Bluetooth

For the most part, It Just Works With Linux, as of March 2012 and Linux kernel 3.3. for this device as driver support crept in However, it currently needs suspend/resume tweak, and bluetooth needs a kernel patch (patch is in Ubuntu around April 2012; and in Fedora as of kernel 3-3.2-1 by end of April 2012, see Fedora bugzilla #808650 and #811087).

Pointers for interested users:

Audio Port Problem

In April I noticed small shards of glass (!) falling out of the audio port. In May, I got some more, and the port became blocked with glass. I opened the box up (quite easy to do) and cleaned out the audio port as best I can. It now works again.

My guess: this is a combination electronic and optical (S/PDIF) audio port, and the optical part broke. It’s fairly disconcerting to have glass shards fall out of a laptop computer, but now that the port is clean it seems to work (at least electrically :-).

FreeBSD

A Fedora Forum post lists that FreeBSD installs, but neither networking (USB ethernet nor wireless) works.

Copyright © 2012-2016 by John Heidemann