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Installing Linux on Asus Notebooks

latest modification: Sept, 19th. 1999 by Christian Czezatke

How To Set Up The Notebook Step-by-step

This is a guided tour to installing Linux on the Asus notebooks. Just do the things as described here step by step and you should be all set.
Installing Linux on an Asus notebook requires the following steps:

Getting Linux To Boot

General Considerations

In order to install Linux on the Asus notebook from CD-ROM, the CD--ROM must be mounted in the notebook chassis while the floppy disk must be connected to the parallel port with a special cable that is shipped with the notebook. However, this causes no problems for Linux since the fact that the floppy is now connected to the parallel port is totally transparent to the operating system. So you can access the floppy disk as "/dev/fd0" as usual.

Just follow the installation instructions provided with your Linux distribution of choice.

Installing a base system should not cause any troubles with any distribution. After completing this step, you should be able to boot your notebook under Linux and log into a text-console. Furthermore you should configure X11 so that it uses the Standard VGA (VGA16) driver. This should give you a working X window environment even if it is limited to 640x480 right now. (BTW: The touchpad behaves like a normal PS/2 mouse.)

Setting up X11

Overview

As mentioned here, there are three different graphic chips that can be found in the Asus notebooks.

Help! --  I Don't Know My Display Hardware!

Just do a cat /proc/pci and look for the output it generates. For the NeoMagic chip, for example, you'll find a line like the following in the output: 
VGA compatible controller: Neomagic MagicGraph NM2160 (rev 1).
You should be able to identify any of the other chips in that way, too. Maybe your distribution even comes with some nifty tool, such as lspci.
 

Supported Chips (aka: Neomagic and ATI Rage Pro LT)

Just start the X11 configuration tool available with your distribution (or use the standard XF86Setup tool, as I do). Just select "Neomagic 128XD" in your tool for the Neomagic chip, or "ATI Rage Pro" (or anything known to use the Mach64 Server) for the ATI Rage Pro LT chip.

As for refresh rates, they are usually a non-issue for TFT displays. So if you are prompted for refresh rates by your configuration tool, I'd reocmmend to just pick "1024x768@60Hz" (or 800x600@60 Hz if you have an 800x600 display). -- Just in case, here is my XF86Config file that I'm using on my Asus notebook (1024x768 pixel at 16bpp). --- Of course it is provided without any warranty... ;-)

The X Servers supports a variety of different resolutions and color depths and makes use of the specific chips' acceleration features.

Unsupported Chip (Silicon Motion SMI 910)

You need VESA framebuffer support enabled in your kernel. Furthermore, you have to use the VESA framebuffer X11 server. This will allow you to run X11, but the acceleration features of the SMI chip will remain unused. (However, X11 should still be fast enough for everyday work, such as word processing.)

Click here for a description of how to set up X11 like this.

Concluding Remarks

The XF86Config file is usually kept in the /etc directory or the /etc/X11 directory. After completing this step, you should be able to fire up X11 by typing startx. X11 should be up and running in high resolution and with high color depth.

Setting up Audio

Help! -- In Don't Know My Audio Hardware

This is a bit trickier, since we're dealing with ISA hardware here. Install the "isapnp" utilities that come with your distribution. Next do a pnpdump and look at the output it generates. You should be able to easily identify the kind of sound hardware by that mean. For example, for the Yamaha OPL3-SAx sound hardware, you should find a line reading similar to the following one in your output: 
 # ANSI string -->YAMAHA OPL3-SAx Audio System<--
You should now know which kind of sound hardware you have in your Asus notebook.

Ensonic Majestro Users (ESS-1978)

There is a driver that is currently in alpha state included with current 2.2.x Linux kernel versions. However, I've also heard that people have had success in running their ESS Majestro audio hardware under Linux by using the Soundblaster driver after configuring the device using Windows utilities.

It is also worth having a look at the homepage of the Linux Advanced Sound Architecture (ALSA) Project at www.alsaproject.org.
Maybe they have an audio driver that works like a charm with the ESS-1978 (at least they do have one for the built-in ESS-Solo1 in my desktop PC...)

However, if you have more information on that issue (how to get ESS-1978 up and running without booting other OSes before starting Linux ;-)) please let me know.

Yamaha OPL3-SAx Users

Getting audio up and running under Linux requires the following steps:

1) Configure and activate the notebook's sound chip by using the ISA plug and play utilities for Linux.

You have to install the isapnp utilities that come with your distribution. If you don't want to configure ISAPNP yourself, you can use my own isapnp.conf file. This should work fine on any other Asus notebook with the OPL3-SAx sound chip. (Just in case you don't have ISAPNP bundled with your distribution, you can always find the latest Linux ISA P'n'P utilities here .

2) Add the following lines to your /etc/modules.conf file:

####### audio options for Yamaha OPL3 SAx
alias char-major-14 opl3sa2
pre-install opl3sa2 modprobe "-k" "ad1848"
post-install opl3sa2 modprobe "-k" opl3"
options opl3sa2 io=0x100 mss_io=0x530 mpu_io=0x330 irq=5 dma=0 dma2=7
options opl3 io=0x388
######## end of Yamaha audio options

Please keep in mind that these settings must correspond to the ones specified in your isapnp.conf file. So if you change them there, don't forget to update your modules.conf file, too.

3) Build the sound driver modules (probably not necessary for many distributions...)

You need the following hardware-specific kernel modules for this soundchip. (Your distribution will probably have this modules already compiled for you):

Conclusions on Sound Setup for Yamaha OPL3-SAx

You should now be able to playback sounds (WAV, for example) and use your CD-ROM drive as a CD-player. However, recording sound does not yet work perfectly. Using Linux 2.2.11 I've managed to record sound using all the settings above, but recorded audio sounded very distorted when I tried to play it.

Getting PCMCIA/CardBus Cards To Work

The Asus notebooks have two PCMCIA type II (or one PCMCIA type III) slot(s) that are controlled by a TI PCI-1131 controller. I've successfully used a 10Mbit Ethernet PCMCIA adapter and a modem card with the notebook under Linux, so at least PCMCIA compliant devices work just fine. Even 100Mbit CardBus ethernet adapters have been reported to work fine by others. In order to get PCMCIA cards (and maybe CardBus cards, too) to work under Linux on the Asus notebooks, it is enough to install the PCMCIA cardservice package. This package should be part of your Linux distribution.

Please note that you have to recompile the Linux PCMCIA card service package after each kernel recompile!

You can always get the latest version of the Linux PCMCIA package from here. --- When compiling the PCMCIA cardservice package, I've also enabled the experimental support for CardBus, but I think that this is not necessary to get PCMCIA cards working on the Asus notebook.

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This page was last modified at October 9th, 1999.
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