Linux on ASUS S1300 Laptop (S1000 series)

On this page, I have described what I have done to install Linux on my ASUS S1300 notebook. I take no responsibility for what you do with the information, or any of the information itself.

Overview
The ASUS S1300 is build on the Intel i830M chipset. In my point of view, there is only one major problems in running Linux on this machine: APM is not supported by the BIOS. That being said, the machine runs Linux very well, and is very convenient to carry because of the small size and low weight.

In general the screen is of good quality, bright and clear, and the external monitor connection is reasonable. However, when I connect my PortBar II to the computer, the external screen is very blury, which makes the PortBar II useless. I don't know if this is a general problem or not.

Below are described some installation details and fixes for various problems.

I installed Gentoo Linux on my machine with reiserfs filesystems. Everything went smoothly. Remember to have a big swap partition, if you want to use hibernation. Before deciding which distribution to use, you might want to read the power management section. Probably you will have less problems trying with SuSE.

X server
XFree 4.2.0 works, but if you want OpenGL and the RENDER extension, you'll need a more recent version of XFree. The newer XFree servers comes with a i830 kernel module, to replace the kernel distributed as part of the kernel sources. At the moment I use kernel 2.4.20 with XFree server 4.2.99.4 and the kernel modules from this release. Everything works well.

The BIOS that came with my machine, only allocates 1MB of memory for the display, and therefore only 256 colors was available in 1024x768. A BIOS update is therefore necessary. Use at least version V0201 from ASUS' download pages.

Network
Ethernet works by use of the 8139too kernel module. I have sucessfully made my Handspring Visor synchronize through IRDA.

Power Management
This is a tough one. The only APM stuff which is working is to shut the machine off. Instead you'll need the ACPI stuff. There is basically four options:

Use a resent 2.4 kernel with ACPI patches. This will make the processor fans working, making you able to receive acpi events from the power and lid buttons, make speed step work and read the battery status. Suspend to RAM (S0) and suspend to disk (S3) won't work.
Use the SuSE kernel. This kernel is based on 2.4.19 and includes a backport of the ACPI code from 2.5. This means that it supports the same as the option above, and suspend to RAM. However, I am having some problems with the machine crasching sometimes after the suspend, but I'll provide more info on this option soon. More info on the SuSE ACPI stuff here. To compile the kernel with devfs support, you need to include a line after line 64 in include/linux/genhd.h saying int number;.
Use a resent 2.4 kernel with ACPI patches and Software suspend (SWSUSP) patches. This will make the ACPI features of the first option available, together with suspend to disk. I've tried several versions of this patch, and there always have been some problems with it, but maybe you have better luck.
Use a recent 2.5 kernel. I haven't tried this option, but both suspend to disk and RAM is implemented.

With ACPI you can control SpeedStep using the following line to get down in CPU speed:
echo -n 1 > /proc/acpi/processor/CPU0/performance
and back to full speed:
echo -n 0 > /proc/acpi/processor/CPU0/performance
To have this done automatically, speedstep daemon should work, although I haven't had much success yet. Having a working ACPI kernel, you can furthermore have the system react to ACPI button events, like the power button and closing of the lid. Use acpi4asus to do just that. Thanks to Julien Lerouge for the info and hard work.

Sound
Sound works using either OSS or ALSA dirvers. The OSS kernel module (i810_audio, however only with a sample rate of 48KHz. The ALSA driver snd-intel8x0 works at 44.1KHz, but performs the upsampling in the driver, since the SigmaTel audio codec used on this laptop does not support 44.1KHz in hardware.

USB
USB is working just fine.

PCMCIA
This has been reported to work (even with wireless networking) by Gilles Fedak.

Touchpad
To use the extra functionality provided by the touchpad use the Synaptics TouchPad Driver in XFree (reported by Gilles Fedak and Werner Heuser).

Modem
Drivers for the modem can be found on http://www.mbsi.ca/cnxtlindrv. The hsflinmodem-5.03.03.L2mbsibeta02060200 has been reported to work sucessfully. Thanks to Thorsten Sandfuchs for the info.

Firewire
Firewire works fine, at least for the external harddrive I'm using, with the ieee1394 kernel module.

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Last updated 13/8-2003.