UL30VT, Nvidia card working in Linux

Jonlin · 05-08-10, 10:15 AM

Hi,

Just like many others I have had problems getting the Nvidia card working in Linux, not being able to come up with a solution of my own or getting any help from the Asus support.

Last weekend I grew tired of it and had a look at the BIOS settings once again, trying to see if there was any way to get it working. Not finding anything I changed a setting on a whim, putting the SATA-controller in compability mode for Win 2000/XP, booted up in Linux and to my great surprise saw that the Nvidia card was active instead of the Intel card. I installed the Nvidia drivers from the Ubuntu repository (10.04) and confirmed that acceleration worked with World of Warcraft in Wine, which it did.

This doesn't really make any sense, changing settings for a disk controller shouldn't do this, but it did. I have been running my UL30VT like this for a week, not noticing any problems at all - wireless, sound etc is working just as before, and I can not notice any differences in disk read/write performance.

I have not booted Windows 7 on my machine since changing this setting, and have no idea about how this effects stability or performance in that OS. So, if you need to dual boot you should perhaps be careful.

I have not had the possibility to test this on other UL-models, but suppose it is very possible it might work on those as well. I have BIOS version 207, and have not tested on other versions.

05-08-10, 10:15 AM	#1
Jonlin Registered User Join Date: May 2010 Posts: 2	UL30VT, Nvidia card working in Linux Hi, Just like many others I have had problems getting the Nvidia card working in Linux, not being able to come up with a solution of my own or getting any help from the Asus support. Last weekend I grew tired of it and had a look at the BIOS settings once again, trying to see if there was any way to get it working. Not finding anything I changed a setting on a whim, putting the SATA-controller in compability mode for Win 2000/XP, booted up in Linux and to my great surprise saw that the Nvidia card was active instead of the Intel card. I installed the Nvidia drivers from the Ubuntu repository (10.04) and confirmed that acceleration worked with World of Warcraft in Wine, which it did. This doesn't really make any sense, changing settings for a disk controller shouldn't do this, but it did. I have been running my UL30VT like this for a week, not noticing any problems at all - wireless, sound etc is working just as before, and I can not notice any differences in disk read/write performance. I have not booted Windows 7 on my machine since changing this setting, and have no idea about how this effects stability or performance in that OS. So, if you need to dual boot you should perhaps be careful. I have not had the possibility to test this on other UL-models, but suppose it is very possible it might work on those as well. I have BIOS version 207, and have not tested on other versions.