ASUS Zenbook UM425
| Hardware | PCI/USB ID | Working? |
|---|---|---|
| GPU | Yes | |
| Wireless | Yes | |
| Audio | Yes | |
| Touchpad | Partial | |
| Keyboard | Partial | |
| Camera | Yes | |
| Card Reader | Yes | |
| Bluetooth | Yes |
Configuration
Secure Boot (option)
In order to boot any Linux operating system, navigate to BIOS (hold F2 during power-on), then hit F7 or click on Advanced Menu, then the Security tab and set Secure Boot to Off.
If the aforementioned Secure Boot option is a menu rather than an on-or-off option, click on Secure Boot, Key Management, then Reset to Setup Mode and confirm in the dialog.
Video
See AMD and Hardware video acceleration.
Audio
See PulseAudio.
Touchpad
See Libinput.
The NumPad is working with asus-touchpad-numpad-driver implementation from GitHub. Be sure to install python-libevdev and i2c-tools before starting systemd's service, otherwise this script will not work.
Keyboard
Some people encounter issues on cold boot where the keyboard is unresponsive.
Adding i8042.probe_defer to the kernel parameters seems to resolve the problem, this can be done by either rebooting, using a USB keyboard, or using chroot.
See https://lore.kernel.org/lkml/20211112180022.10850-1-tiwai@suse.de/T/ (this commit only seems to mention the UA version but this was tested on UX425QA).
Battery charge threshold
Battery charge threshold is working. Laptop's battery stops charging at certain percentage when value in /sys/class/power_supply/BATT/charge_control_end_threshold is set to either 60, 80, or 100. But upower may report the wrong charging status and percentage when the battery threshold is set below 100; You may see the status listed as "Charging" even when the battery is fully charged to the limit, and the percentage may be one point short of the limit. For example when charging to 80, the battery's charge may say 79. See https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/upower/upower/-/issues/142
In order to automatically change the value at boot, user can create the systemd service: refer to Laptop/ASUS#Battery charge threshold
Tips and tricks
Power saving and performance
As advertised by ASUS, both laptops are capable to last up to 20 hours on battery. In order to achieve this, see:
- BIOS update - It is generally recommended to update BIOS, as it usually brings performance, power-saving and security features.
- Power Saving - List of general recommendations to increase battery life.
- Improving performance - List of general recommendations to increase performance.
- SSD - Tips and tricks for Solid State Drives. Both laptops ship M.2 SSD by default.
- Undervolting CPU - Decrease voltage for Intel CPU (reduce battery drain, reduce heat and therefore - reduce fan speed)
Extract Windows 10 license key
The laptop comes with Windows 10 preinstalled and the activation key is hardcoded into the firmware. If you replace Windows with Linux, then hardcoded activation key is useless. You might want to extract it and use somewhere else (e.g. virtualized Windows 10):
# grep -aPo '[\w]{5}-[\w]{5}-[\w]{5}-[\w]{5}-[\w]{5}' /sys/firmware/acpi/tables/MSDM