Hello forum. I believe this is my first post. I have, however, been a reader of this forum for some time.

I am having a problem with my newly bought ultrabook (Asus UX302lg, specs below). Well for starters, it had Win8 pre-installed. Tried Win8 for some hours and decided to completely remove it and install Slackware on it (my primary os). After playing around with GPT and UEFI (a new concept for me), I finally got it installed.

Under first boot I can see the boot text (do not know what it is called, sorry, but same as shows up with command) and in the end of the lines, the internal monitor turns black, with backlight. When I connect an external monitor the terminal shows up there, but wrong resolution (is it connected on boot, it starts with a useable resolution on external monitor). I can etc and x starts on the external monitor.

I've tried with nomodeset and then I get the terminal on the internal screen, but cannot startx. Because of this fault I thought it might be wise to install proprietary drivers for my Nvidia GPU. So I installed Bumblebee according to the slackdocs. Can run Optirun etc, without problems. I can configure xrandr so the internal is right to the external etc, and it looks like it is configured and working, but is still black.

I had the same problem on Debian and Ubuntu as well, but I am using Slackware 14.1 at the moment and believe this problem has something to do with the loading of the kernel or something around there.

I was wondering if some of you might have encountered a similar problem and how it was fixed. The amount spent on fixing this is way over 30 hours and this is the first time I've encountered any major problems on Linux-systems, as well as it's on a newly bought computer. Starting to get desperate and frustrated, that's why I'm posting it here.

Thanks in advance.


Ultrabook specs:
Intel i7 U4500 CPU
Intel HD 4400 gpu-chip(?)
Nvidia 730M GPU
FHD (1920x1080) internal monitor (shows up in xrandr as eDP1)
also HDMI output and mDP output (using a mDP to vga adapter for external montior)

External monitor specs:
Old 4:3 1280x1024 HP (shows up in xrandr as DP1), connected to mDP output through a vga adapter.

If there's any information which could be helpful, just let me know (don't know where to start), and I'll get it!

I have a company-provided Thinkpad T510 with the dreaded hack of an Optimus video combo, and I went through pretty much the same thing when trying to get CentOS 6 and Fedora (I think it was 18) loaded onto it.

Eventually I believe the solution was to completely disable the nouveau driver along with a few other steps. Otherwise the laptop would either show a black screen and/or hard freeze after only a few minutes.

Eventually I gave up and went back to Windows 7 (eek).

For what it's worth, I'm not sure what steps are necessary on Slackware, but this post related to F18/F19 might be of some help?

http://forums.fedoraforum.org/showthread.php?p=1678061

In any case, most consider the Optimus graphics combination a horrible, buggy hardware implementation at best, so don't feel like it's just you!! I think the biggest issue relates to the proprietary nature of the hardware and the fact no open source drivers can be developed to work with it correctly (and why it works so well on the closed Windows platform).

Thanks for the reply. After some days away from the computer I finally got something working, not 100% what I wanted, but it looks like I played with the CSM option in UEFI and something bugged up. I do however have some problems with backlight and other small problems, but I guess I`ll fix it pretty soon.

Nomodeset and CSM had to be activated, followed the slackwiki tutorial on Bumblebee and now I got that working as well.