Hi, greetings from Mexico. I just acquired a nice asus laptop which I have installed gentoo. I compiled the kernel myself, most of the hardware is working, just some audio issues.

I enabled the important ACPI options built into the kernel, like the power button. To my surprise, hitting that power button doesn't work, the battery is not recognized (although, it could be a dbus issue), most importantly, I want to know if newer models are coming up with similar issues.

This one in particular was given to me, so I didn't choose this hardware. The boot partition is a 100 meg EFI partition. So, I'm not using grub or lilo, just plain efi.

Anyways, I can live with ACPI not working, but check out this audio config from hell. Its got a Realtek card in it, its main module is snd-hda-intel. I can get the main speakers to work just fine. But when I want my headphones to work, that's when it gets interesting.

On windows (sadly it works too well), if I plug in a 2 ring jack set, it asks if its a headset, headphones, or out-speakers. It has to do some sort of converting, because it can also accept a 3-jack with built-in headset.

Now, this isn't about making that work, I think its too much trouble, even for someone from alsa. But, for me to redirect audio, to a 3-jack headphone/headset, I have to run a python script from alsa called hda-analyzer. (After much thinkering) it sorta does the job, the audio peaks at a level that I consider a bit too low, and alsamixer thinks I'm using my normal speakers, so headphone volume controls are null.

Something that gets me pissed is the fact that everytime I switch from audacious to normal youtube or something else, my audio levels reset to "boot" settings.

Other than that, great graphics, decent wifi. And software libre, gotta love gnu.

So, if someone could direct me to a source of information that could help me, I would be much obliged.

Well, its not the first time I try to figure it out.
I had some help from #alsa in freenode.

I was told to remove battery, plug off power supply, leave like that for about 3 minutes, and then boot directly into linux.

Since I'm dual booting I will most certainly need to change my boot options in the EFI menu so that Linux comes up first, since Windows usually boots fast and asks no questions. After that, I have to remove the battery, my only way to do such a thing is to get a screwdriver and open it. Honestly asus, how bout you not do that again. How about you stop lickin' Microsoft's boots.

The logic behind this is that the computer is never turned off completely and the kernel doesn't know what to do with such options.

My guess is that this might in fact fix ACPI. The audio part, I'm not betting on it.

Now, what I'm thinking is I don't really need to open it up, I want to keep my warranty and such. So, the best way to do this, is to get it on battery power (in gentoo or a live cd), drain it completely and it should do the trick. But, the battery might protect itself, and not go all the way to zero, and the kernel options might be still up.

What do you guys think?

You sure you compiled your kernel with all the proper options enabled?

Well, it seems that I have been in the vanilla glory of using slackware myself. Since I acquired new hardware, I felt the need to install a distro with optimization in mind, hence Gentoo.

So, all I did was run DBUS. That fixed my acpi problems. BUT, acpi does not seem to work on console-only. It works great with KDE. On an old computer my powerbutton used to turn it off immediately, now, it just gives me the logoff screen, which I think is a nice safety measure.

I don't have my headphones with me, I will test the audio portion later.

Well, I just got audio to work, it was quite the adventure, I got more help from #alsa on freenode, and I've sent all debugging info to the alsa-devel mailing list.

So, if you're really interested, just take a look at that particular info, hopefully it will be patched in a future kernel release.

Maybe the user isn't listed in the powerdev group.