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Asus 1215N under Debian 6 and Debian 7

FYI: This is legacy information. Since the Asus 1215N is an older model, I don't know if this interests many of you. I will keep it online for the sake of completeness. I switched to a Clevo W370ST, also under Debian.

Hardware	Status under Linux	Notes
Atom D525, 1.8 GHz, dual core	works
2 GB DDR3, single channel	works
Western Digital hard disk	works	disk permanently spins down and ignores all hdparm commands except disabling APM completely, this is what I did to solve the problem
Display, 1366x768	works
Touchpad	works
Broadcom BCM4313 WLAN chip	works	use the brcm80211 driver
Atheros AR8152 LAN chip	works	use the atl1c driver
USB 2.0 controller (3 ports)	works
VGA port	works
HDMI port	?	didn't test
Intel GMA 3150 graphics	works
nVidia Optimus technology	problematic	you can disable Optimus manually via acpi_call which gives you at least 1 hour more running time
nVidia ION 2 chip (512 MB DDR3)	problematic	no support
Intel HD audio chip	works
Card reader (SD, MMC)	?	didn't test
Bluetooth 3.0	works
Webcam, 640x480	works

In February 2011, I got my new notebook, a 12.1" Asus 1215N. I chose this one because of its low weight and its (currently) superior hardware (for a netbook). I started with Debian 6 and moved to Debian 7. (I always use Debian Testing.)

Tips

Do not disable the WLAN chip. I tried this, and as soon as the network manager wanted to scan the network, the system froze. Then, each time I rebooted the machine, Debian hung while starting wicd. You'll have to activate the chip again in the BIOS (or under Windows which won't crash). UPDATE: I don't know if this problem still persists with the current kernel and drivers.
Disable the power management of the Western Digital WD3200BEVT hard disk. I experienced a permanent spin down of the disk (you can hear this, it makes a clicking noise). Everytime I wanted to save a document or open a dialog, I had to wait several seconds until the hard disk was ready to work. This shortens the lifespan of the drive and is extremely annoying. Finally, I figured out that only completely disabling power management using the command sudo hdparm -B255 your-drive-name helps. (I modified /etc/hdparm.conf so that the change is not forgotten at reboot.) Beforehand, I had made a BIOS update using Windows and ASUS Update (the original version in the machine is outdated) and changed the disk mode from AHCI to IDE, so I don't know if hdparm alone suffices to solve the problem or if the BIOS update is also necessary.
Be careful with kernel updates. In general, they work fine, but when I installed a regular update from 3.1.6 to 3.1.8, suddenly hdparm could not speak to the hard disk any more (I noticed this because of the familiar "clicking" sound). I had to change the drive name from /dev/disk/by-label/main to /dev/sda in order to get it to work again. I find this strange, because the main label still exists.
At first, the machine didn't produce any sound. This was because the speaker volume was set to zero in the mixer.
The BIOS version is outdated. I updated it using ASUS Update under Windows.
If you don't disable the Optimus chipset manually (using acpi_call, for example), you will only get a battery runtime of 4-5 hours or so under Linux.

User experience

I use Debian Testing (kernel 3.2 from the official repo) together with Xfce 4.10. The RAM usage is very moderate: immediately after startup, with NetworkManager and some panel applets loaded, the system consumes less than 128 MB memory. The software I use most of the time is gedit, Opera, LibreOffice, Pidgin, Terminal, and GCC. I also use Iceweasel, Eclipse, Netbeans, GIMP, Inkscape, VLC, Audacity, Hydrogen, FileZilla, Nemiver, and some other programs. All works smoothly, even watching full screen Flash videos (depending on the player). Also games are possible with integrated graphics: Bos Wars, Extreme Tux Racer, OpenArena, and OpenTTD work fine, only SuperTuxKart has a low frame rate (which probably is the fault of SuperTuxKart). Since kernel 3.1, the system is completely stable (before, the WLAN driver could cause kernel panics in certain avoidable situations).

last modified: Wed 18 Sep 2013 11:20:58 PM CEST