The Notebook Review forums were hosted by TechTarget, who shut down them down on January 31, 2022. This static read-only archive was pulled by NBR forum users between January 20 and January 31, 2022, in an effort to make sure that the valuable technical information that had been posted on the forums is preserved. For current discussions, many NBR forum users moved over to NotebookTalk.net after the shutdown.
Asus laptops in general, are well
supported under Linux. However, ATI Linux driver
support has historically lagged behind nVidia's Linux driver
support. There's a good article on the subject,
here.
ATI Linux driver support is available through two programs. ATI's, closed source, proprietary
driver, and an ATI supported, open source
driver. ATI's recent proprietary Linux driver releases have included support for the ATI HD5800 series Desktop GPUs. While the current driver release notes don't specifically state support for the Radeon Mobility HD5800 series, you can read that several posters to
this thread over at the Phoronix forums, mention Linux support of the G73Jh's HD5870 GPU working with the ATI Catalyst driver since version 9.10, particularly on page
5, and page
6.
If you happen to get the correct driver installed and running under Linux, please feel free to come back here and post your experiences, including driver type and version, xorg.conf tips, etc. If your Linux distro doesn't provide good instructions for installing the ATI driver, you can visit the unofficial ATI Linux driver Wiki
here, which provide instructions for installing either version of the Linux driver, for different distros. (The wiki appears to be down at the moment). For example,
here's the Ubuntu 9.04/9.10 guide for installing them. It might be as simple
as;
provided Ubuntu installs the 9.10, (or later), version.
Good news for anyone wanting to install Linux on their G73Jh, the ATI Catalyst 10.4 beta drivers provide support for the 5870 GPU. Described over in the Linux forums in my post,
here, (just in case you don't visit the Linux users forum much..).
The drivers are there, mine's running 1920x1080, but there's a stupid watermark from AMD in the lower right corner, apparently there's a way to fix it but I'm not using linux on the laptop that much.
It's funny that under Gentoo I don't see the watermark. Anyway a user posted the watermark fix in this
post, on the Gentoo user forums. In a root terminal window, issue the following command;
I'm actually the reverse. Spending most of my time in Linux. The driver definitely needs improvement, especially in terms of performance, but I'm really looking forward to the open source, (radeon), driver support of this GPU.
I definitely understand how one can come to that conclusion. In the past I always chose nVidia based laptops exclusively, because I felt that they were providing the best Linux support. Their Linux driver was updated fairly regularly, it supported the majority of nVidia GPUs, as well as supported the majority of nVidia GPU features, (such as HD video decoding through VDPAU), and provided good overall Linux performance. Their closed source, proprietary, driver was definitely the best Linux driver available, from a functionality perspective.
However, Intel then introduced their GPU technology, and while it's not in the same league as nVidia or ATI from a performance perspective, they did something interesting when they brought their support of open source software, into the GPU arena. They showed that it was possible to support open source software with drivers, that were largely open sourced. Then came ATI's announcement of a reboot of their Linux driver effort, (maybe as a result of the AMD acquisition), and it looks to be modeled much more along the lines of Intel's, now. By adding engineer support in house, ATI's proprietary Linux driver has definitely improved over the last two years, and while still not as good as nVidia's, they've recently starting reaching for feature parity, (such as their effort to support HD decoding through the VA-API).
The major difference to me is that while ATI's proprietary driver is catching up to nVidia's from a performance and feature perspective, (with a ways to go yet), their approach is to support open source software. They pay developers to work on the open source drivers, at the same time that they release specifications to the Linux community. nVidia, on the other hand, has been exhibiting some very strange behavior towards open source software, as evidenced by the following items of interest;
So, (provided you can get a good Linux driver to work with your GPU hardware, Optimus excluded), maybe it comes down what's more important; majority functionality/performance today, or most functionality/performance today, with more to come, but with an open source driver. If absolute current Linux GPU performance was the most important factor, it would certainly be reasonable to advise an nVidia based solution.
However, that's not my need, and I've got plenty of CPU power available that can help with video performance today, and I can wait on the open source drivers to improve. More importantly, I think for a company to support Linux, they need to support the open source values, which underpin Linux. So for me, my most recent purchase decision was made much easier.
I replaced my work/travel laptop with the N81Vp, (ATI 4670), which is running the radeon open source driver, (with 3d effects) under KDE 4.4.2. I also replaced my main laptop with the Asus G73Jh, (ATI's 5870), and while I needed to install the latest ATI proprietary 10.4 beta driver to get 3d effects working under KDE 4.4.2, it's good enough to hold me over until the open source drivers supports it.
Problems? See this thread at archive.org.
