I have recently purchased the laptop Asus G73J and installed OpenSUSE 11.2 . There are some issues that need to be solved for this laptop model.
1 - The graphics card driver. I has an ATI Mobility Radeon HD 5870 and the opensource driver does not support it yet. Also there is no official AMD driver for Linux yet. The default driver works but does it is limited. For example it does not allow the native monitor resolution of 1920 by 1080.
2 - The EPM Asus is not supported as well as the hardware control shortcut keys (wireless card, twin turbo mode, keyboard backlighting, volume control, monitor output, etc.) . Even the brightness behaves strange. It either is either in full or minimum brightness.
3 - the touch pad driver also seems not to be working properly. Tapping interpreted as clicking, one has to use the buttons.
It would be really nice to have openSUSE 100% working on this recent laptop model. It is a really good laptop and in its segment and it is becoming very popular.
Are you sure the card is not supported by latest Catalyst drivers ? That would solve the resolution problem.
Change the keyboard from the Generic…to “Asus Laptop”. That will not give you all the keyboard’s features, but at least the ones ASUS thinks you need on linux
Is this a synaptic touchpad, or some other pointing device, like in my laptop?
It’s always a risk, to buy very recent hardware. Many hardware manufacturors are slow on providing info to the linux kernel.
If you want to give it a go, download a Milestone 7 LiveCD, boot from it, and see what it does with the laptop’s hardware. I don’t suggest installing, if you don’t know your way around in linux.
Thanks for the help. Changing the keyboard type helped. I didn’t imagine there was an “Asus keyboard” option. Now I can use most controls like enabling and isabling the wireless interface.
As for the graphics it has an ATI Mobility Radeon HD 5870 for which there is no driver yet according to the AMD support site. I installed the Catalyst for the 57xx series and it sort of works. I have full resolution and the brightness control works properly now. However, it behaves strange, I can see the image being replaced for another one every 1 s or so (no smooth transitions). I guess AMD needs to come up with a proper driver.
The rest so far seems to be working fine. If I come across any other odd thing I will post it here.
