In December 2007 I bought an Asus Z53SC-AP132C to replace my ageing Jewel Topaz 9500 notebook. The Jewel's CD/DVD drive electronics had burnt out and the wireless was never very user friendly.

The Z53SC is Mycom's model name for what Asus calls an 'F3Sc'. It comes with a lot of goodies which are quite well supported by current versions of GNU/Linux kernel, drivers and 'userland' software. I took particular care to select a notebook with a supported graphics card and wireless network card, since I did not want to spent a lot of time hunting for workarounds or hacks. Been there ;)

I booted the system only once with Gutsy Gibbon and that worked pretty well, but since I have been using SuSE for years and years, it's a logical choice to install the latest (10.3) version of openSUSE.

Hardware

Here is an overview of what's inside.

I don't have an external monitor so I can't test the VGA and DVI out, and I need to get hold of a set of cables to hook the laptop up to my TV. The 'TV Out' output does not show up in the output of xrandr, which worries me a bit. But then, I haven't put any time in figuring out how to configure the TV output.

The same applies for Firewire (1394a), SP/DIF and the modem. I'm pretty sure they'll work, I just don't have the hardware or necessity to test it.

Installing openSUSE 10.3

Installing openSUSE was easy and effortless, as always. I downloaded the ISO and did a basic install (with KDE) from that. Then I booted the system and used smart to update the installed packages to their latest version, and add new ones.

I have a preference for smart since it works a lot faster than YaST. I mostly use YaST to configure system settings, devices and services, but for installing software (especially when you've enabled multiple online repositories) it's just too slow.

Hardware configuration

System details

Processor

The Intel Core™ 2 Duo T5250 is a 64 bit dual core (SMP) CPU, made with 65 nm technology. It runs at 1500 MHz, is equipped with 2MB Level2 cache and communicates with a FSB running at 667 MHz.

ACPI

Out of the box, suspend to disk and suspend to RAM only worked for 50%. That is: the machine went to sleep but when it woke up the display stayed blank. I tried all available settings of s2ram, but none worked.

Suspecting the display driver, I went to NVIDIA's *NIX download site and got the latest Linux driver installer for Linux x64 (AMD64/EM64T), NVIDIA-Linux-x86_64-169.07-pkg2.run.

I ran the installer (from runlevel 3; as root type init 3 to get there, and init 5 to return to the graphical runlevel), which decided it needed to compile the driver. To do that, it needed the kernel sources, which I installed with smart. The installation went flawlessly and now, when I boot into runlevel 5, I see an NVIDIA splash program just before KDM starts.

With the proper driver now installed, I did the following (as root):

• cp /usr/lib/pm-utils/defaults /etc/pm/config.d/config
• edit /etc/pm/config.d/config and set S2RAM_OPTS="-f -m -a 3".

Now when I press the notebook suspends to RAM. Touching any key returns it to a waking state in just a few seconds. The only thing I need to do manually is select my wireless access point in KNetworkManager (which is in the Panel), and then I'm back online as well. To suspend to disk, select Suspend to Disk from kpowersave's menu, or from the openSUSE start menu. Resume from disk takes a lot longer (obviously), so I don't see myself using it very often.

I use kpowersave to manage powersaving settings, and when the active powersaving scheme is 'acoustic', both cores run at 1000MHz.

The CPU fan is almost always on, which is not so good from a powersaving point of view. Luckily it makes very little noise, and it does not bother me.

Chipset

Mycom sells the notebook as having an Intel 943GML chipset. Upon closer inspection, this is not true though.This notebook is equipped with a 965 chipset.

I'm not sure which one of the 965 family there's inside, but since Intel classifies the T5250 as a 'mainstream' CPU, one would assume that the chipset is also a mainstream chipset, which would make it a GM965. The GM965, however, is equipped with a Graphics Media Accelerator X3100, which is absent in this notebook...

If anyone knows where to look for the definitive clue I'd be interested to learn.

Display

The display is of the glossy kind. I'd read notebook tests, and they mostly favoured the matted screen type, but in the town where I live I haven't been able to find any non-gloss screens. But I'm actually quite happy with this one, provided I shield it from any bright lights...

The keyboard has two shortcut keys to control display brightness: Fn-F5 and Fn-F6, but they do nothing, nor does xbacklight. Screen brightness is correctly controlled by Kpowersave though, and the nvdock utility (discussed elsewhere in this document) works too.

Card reader

About the cardreader, lspci says the following:

09:01.1 Generic system peripheral [Class 0805]: Ricoh Co Ltd R5C822 SD/SDIO/MMC/MS/MSPro Host Adapter (rev 22)
09:01.2 System peripheral: Ricoh Co Ltd R5C843 MMC Host Controller (rev 12)
09:01.3 System peripheral: Ricoh Co Ltd R5C592 Memory Stick Bus Host Adapter (rev 12)
09:01.4 System peripheral: Ricoh Co Ltd xD-Picture Card Controller (rev 12)

I popped in the SD card from a Canon Powershot, and lo and behold, the KDE Daemon pops up a dialog window asking me how to open it (it sees the card as a 'mounted camera'). When selecting Konqueror, the device is mounted at /media/mmcblk0p1, and can be browsed as any block device. Sweet.

Graphics

The onboard graphics card is an NVIDIA GeForce 8400M G. It works out of the box with the packages nvidia-gfxG01-kmp-default-169.07_2.6.22.13_0.3-1.1 and x11-video-nvidiaG01-169.07-1.1. As explained in the ACPI section, I needed to download the latest driver version from NVIDIA to get suspend to RAM/disk to work.

At that moment, 3D acceleration and transparency didn't work yet, so I went to the openSUSE website and followed their instructions. Since I already installed NVIDIA's own drivers, I only had to type in the following commands (as root):

nvidia-xconfig --composite
nvidia-xconfig --render-accel
nvidia-xconfig --allow-glx-with-composite
nvidia-xconfig --add-argb-glx-visuals -d 24

According to this site, I had to move the lines
Option "RenderAccel" "True"
Option "AllowGLXWithComposite" "True"
from the Screen section of xorg.conf to the Device section, which I did.

Restart X, and done! Translucency in KDE works now (although I don't know yet if I like it). With translucency enabled, framerate in glxgears dropped from ca. 2800 FPS to 800 FPS.

With the nvdock utility, you can monitor the performance/temperature of the card, and configure various settings (anti-aliasing, glx, resolution). Tip: Do NOT enable the 'Sync to VBlank' setting in the OpenGLX Settings menu: with it, framerate in glxgears dropped from ca. 2800 FPS to 60 FPS.

There are two other apps in the openSUSE inventory that are supposed to work with NVIDIA cards: asusfan and smartdimmer. The don't do anything on my system, though.

Getting Compiz to work

Took me some time to get Compiz to work, but it does now. This were (more or less) the steps I followed:

• read the instructions on compiz.org
• read the openSUSE's Compiz Fusion site and installed the required packages form this site, too.

The resulting xorg.conf file for my notebook can be found here.

For some reason, Compiz didn't start automatically. Calling fusion-icon manually resulted in the following error:

* Detected Session: kde
* Searching for installed applications...
* NVIDIA on Xorg detected, exporting: __GL_YIELD=NOTHING
* Using the GTK Interface
* Starting Compiz
... executing: compiz --replace --sm-disable --ignore-desktop-hints ccp --loose-binding
compiz: Trying '/usr/$LIB/libIndirectGL.so.1'
compiz (core) - Fatal: No GLXFBConfig for default depth, this isn't going to work.
compiz (core) - Error: Failed to manage screen: 0
compiz (core) - Fatal: No manageable screens found on display :0.0

Apparently this has to do with library locations not being properly setup. So I created my own startup script, ~/bin/kde-start-compiz:

#!/bin/sh
# Start compiz.
#
# Created by Martijn. 28 Dec 2007
#
# See http://forum.compiz-fusion.org/showthread.php?p=43217
# and http://en.opensuse.org/Compiz_Fusion#Compiz_can.27t_start_under_KDE
LD_PRELOAD=/usr/X11R6/lib64/libGL.so.169.07
compiz --replace --sm-disable --ignore-desktop-hints --no-libgl-fallback ccp &
emerald --replace &

Placing a link to this script in ~/.config/autostart ensures that Compiz is started when I log in. It also makes the window widgets (close/minimize, etc.) appear like the should.

To get the SUPER (Windows) key to work as a meta key in Compiz, add the following to the "InputDevice" section in xorg.conf:

Option "XkbOptions" "altwin:super_win"

Sound

The sound card is a 82801H (ICH8 Family) HD Audio Controller. It works out of the box, no configuration necessary.

Webcam

The built-in webcam has 1.3 megapixels and a small mic right beside it. lsusb says the following about it:

Bus 003 Device 002: ID 04f2:b012 Chicony Electronics Co., Ltd

And the system configuration recognizes it as a:

USB2.0 1.3M UVC WebCam

I installed the uvcvideo package, and after a modprobe -r uvcvideo and modprobe -r snd_usb_audio I had the webcam working in Kopete. It also works with kdetv.

It did not work with any of gqcam, camorama, xawtv, wxcam or gmerlin-camelot. I haven't done any telephony with it, but I played around with audacity and the mic works, too.

LAN

The NIC is recognized by YaST as an 'ASUSTeK L1 Gigabit Ethernet Adapter'. I haven't used it yet, but it should be supported out of the box with the atl1 driver.

Wireless

The wireless NIC is recognized as an 'Intel PRO/Wireless 4965 AG or AGN Network'. It works out of the box, with the iwl4965 driver.

Modem

I'm on broadband, so I've got no idea if the modem works. Apparently it's a softmodem. We hates them. Luckily there are folks who got it to work.

Keyboard

Of the special 'function' keys, a number work out of the box and others don't do anything at all. The following keys work:

With the keytouch utility, you can assign commands to certain key combinations. This works for, for example, Amarok: Win-B/C/V/Z control play, pause, next and previous track. The exact keyboard for this particular mobo is not available in keytouch, but I found that selecting the Asus F3JP keyboard works too.