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Ubuntu 10.04 Lucid on ASUS UL20A

August 20th, 2010 subogero

Well, Jaunty was not able to use the full (you know what I mean) resolution of my new TV, so I thought it was time to upgrade. I started Lucid Lynx from a live USB, attached the TV and, to my utter amazement, I was immediately presented with 2 073 600 deep purple pixels.

Upgrade time! Or even more than that. Time to reorganize my partitions. All I left was the original 200 GB home partition, now mounted as “/public”, mainly for my strictly legal (in Hungary) music and movies. If you live in the US of A, do not do this! The monopolists will confiscate your possessions, kill your family and jail you for 2000 years.

Anyway, 65 GB of unused Windows 7 (which I had no other choice than to pay for) was permanently removed, replaced by a new “/home” partition. The remaining 50 GB became “/” (root for starters).

Installation went like a breeze, as usual with Ubuntu. WLAN connected immediately. The telly as an external full high definition monitor? You betcha. Import stuff from old user profile, apt-get all the important packages (gimp, development stuff, openarena), compile and install the freshest hypest midnight commander, and there you go.

One thing. The bloody LCD brightness buttons. They did not work at all. Nor could I set brightness any other way, including the GUI and my Jaunty hack. Nice. This is the point where most people start thinking about suicide.

Others, however, use Google. Which reveals the solution immediately in the form of an Ubuntu wiki page:

acpi-backlight=vendor

has to be added to the GRUB kernel command line. Since then it works beautifully, even the flickering of my Jaunty hack is a thing of the past.

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  1. erpe
    September 28th, 2010 at 11:10 | #1
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    Please update your new information to linlap.com. I think you’ve written the existing information about UL20A with Ubuntu 9.04.

    Is that computer worth buying for Ubuntu user?

  2. subogero
    September 28th, 2010 at 21:00 | #2
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    Yes, it is absolutely worth buying for using with Ubuntu. Especially Lucid Lynx.

  3. erpe
    September 29th, 2010 at 12:25 | #3
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    Thanks!

  4. f rom
    April 24th, 2011 at 21:57 | #4
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    I bought the same model and installed Ubuntu 10.10 netbook edition. I have a similar problem with the LED keys (and I’ve tried your advice; this, unfortunately, didn’t work). Also I’m wondering whether I can make the former start-menu button do anything worth while.

    I would like to note that I’m a beginner with this OS – and have little to no background in programming\seriously maintaining any OS.

    Please help.

    rf.

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