Hi,
I finally succeeded in making my choice about a new pc - the asus zenbook (core i5, 24gb ssd, 500 gb, 4go ram…).
After having troubles (dark stories of bios/boot manager/partitioning system hell) installing GNU/Linux (linux mint 13 & 14), it now works like a charm. Long story short, to keep the install system simple, now you must use x8664 for x8664 and x86 for x86 (at least, it's my conclusion for ubuntu/linuxmint system).
Anyway, the goal of this article is to show the tweaks for setuping the asus zenbook on an ubuntu based (maybe debian based).
- Sources
- Advices
Reboot after each system modifications (regarding file system or boot setup options).
Simply to be able to tell which modification broke the machine.
First backup
Backup the current fstab to avoid any errors.
sudo cp /etc/fstab /etc/fstab.ori
(No need to reboot here)
Update /etc/fstab
Remove writes
From the man `mount` page:
noatime
Do not update inode access times on this filesystem (e.g., for faster access on the news spool to speed up news servers).
nodiratime
Do not update directory inode access times on this filesystem.
discard/nodiscard
Controls whether ext4 should issue discard/TRIM commands to the underlying block device when blocks are freed. This is useful for SSD devices and
sparse/thinly-provisioned LUNs, but it is off by default until sufficient testing has been done.
The asus zenkook owns 2 hdd, one SSD and one SATA. The os is installed on the SSD one.
Adding noatime to avoid excessed writing about access times.
UUID=xyz-blbl-abcd-dcba-xyz / ext4 discard,noatime,errors=remount-ro 0 1
Note noatime is a superset of nodiratime so only noatime is need.
/tmp in ram
To minimize the writing in the ssd, it may be good to mount /tmp in ram.
tmpfs /tmp tmpfs defaults,noatime,mode=1777 0 0
Reboot
scheduler
Check the possibilities of your hardware
Make them permanent
Add those line to /etc/rc.local
echo deadline > /sys/block/sdb/queue/scheduler echo 1 > /sys/block/sdb/queue/iosched/fifo_batch
Reboot
Grub setup
New options
Add this to /etc/default/grub
rootfstype=ext4
To stress that /root in in a ext4 partition.
pcie_aspm=force
To diminish the loss of power during idle time.
drm.vblankoffdelay=1 i915.semaphores=1
To save power.
nmi_watchdog=0
Deactivate the watchdog.
Final Result
GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="quiet splash rootfstype=ext4 pcie_aspm=force drm.vblankoffdelay=1 i915.semaphores=1 nmi_watchdog=0"
Update grub
sudo update-grub
Reboot
Gnome bindings (optional)
Those one does not entirely work, you may skip.
sudo aptitude install cheese gconftool-2 -s /desktop/gnome/keybindings/custom0/name -t string 'Web Cam' gconftool-2 -s /desktop/gnome/keybindings/custom0/binding -t string 'XF86WebCam' gconftool-2 -s /desktop/gnome/keybindings/custom0/action -t string 'cheese'
Reboot
Now enjoy.