Asus 1215n

The Asus 1215n is a small laptop with a 12" glossy screen, a Intel Atom D525 1.8 GHz (64 bits, 2 cores with hyper threading), two graphic cards (discrete intel + nvidia ION2), 250 GiB of hard disk space and a battery life of 4-7 hours. It has a Broadcom wireless card (with wifi N) and a wired network card. It was first sold in September 2010 at about 500-600$.

This article isn't intend to give all the information yet. It's only a first draft.

= Hardware =

BIOS
By default revision 503 will be present, by updating it to 701 you will be able to run more then 2.7 GB. When running on revision 503 the maximum amount will be 4 GB that you can install and 2.7 GB you will be able to use even on a 64 bit system. By flashing to revision 701 you will be able to install and use up to 8 GB (as tested so far).

CPU
There are 4 declared cpu, so only the first is shown here for brevity : /proc/cpuinfo

Note: The Intel Atom D serie cannot adjust its frequency. Cpufreq is useless at the moment with this cpu. But it is possible to use CPU throttling with laptop-mode and p4_clockmod kernel module.

PCI
lspci

USB
lsusb

= Kernel = This section has to be fulled.

= Graphic cards = At the moment we didn't find a way to use the nvidia card as the graphic renderer. The solution to increase the autonomy is to shutdown the nvidia and use the discrete intel. To do so we have to use acpi_call with a special patch found here:. You have to download it, insert into the kernel as module (insmod) and use the shell script to enable or disable the nvidia card. When the nvidia is shutdown, you gain an extra +30% of autonomy and the laptop doesn't warm anymore.

= Disable Nvidia Card = To save battery power we can turn off discrete graphics card.

before

after

to-do Now you can add asus1215n.sh to autostart of your graphic environment

= Frame Buffer = You can use the Intel frame buffer through KMS (Kernel Mode Setting) by enabling CONFIG_DRM_I915_KMS in the kernel. It gives you the native frame buffer which allows to switch between Xorg and Console without break.

= Networking = There are two network cards: The wired Atheros and the wireless Broadcom.

Wired
You should use a kernel >= 2.6.36 because the previous drivers weren't made for the chipset (AR8152) of this laptop. We had some issues on previous kernels using SSH. The corresponding driver is atl1c (CONFGI_ATL1C).

Or: Wired

Wired

Wireless
NOTE: Since kernel 3.0+ the Broadcom Wifi card is supported by opensource driver. Enable it from Device Drivers > Staging drivers > Broadcom IEEE802.11n PCIe SoftMAC WLAN driver (CONFIG_BRCMSMAC), you need also firmware for brcm80211 from sys-kernel/linux-firmware.

Closed-source broadcom-sta driver :

Sound
The sound card is a standard Intel HDA which is fully supported by the kernel. Note that on 2.6.35 you have to set snd-hda-intel model=auto in your /etc/modprobe.d/alsa.conf. You can even enable the headset detection. If You have no sound on your speakers, try to set snd-hda-intel model=eeepc-p901

Webcam
works with uvcvideo module

Special keys
To be able to use the special keys like up/down volume you have to enable in the kernel eeepc_wmi.

= Xorg = At the moment since we cannot use the nvidia card, there is no need for a xorg.conf or policy for hald. The intel card is used by default.