Installing Arch Linux on ASUS G750/G751

by Lukas

I recently installed Arch Linux on my ASUS G751 laptop. I will share some of the problems I faced and solutions in case someone else is considering installing Arch on his G75x.

Booting and graphics rendering

At the time of this blog post the current version of the nouveau driver does not support the GeForce GTX970M/GTX980M. This will change in the future. Refer to nouveau's feature matrix for the current state of card support.

For this reason it is necessary to disable the auto-loading of the nouveau driver by modern Linux kernels upon boot. Otherwise you will only get a blank screen. To do this, press e in the Arch boot menu and append the following: 

nomodeset

This will force Linux to use software graphics rendering instead of using the nouveau driver. Your machine has powerful hardware so you will have no further issues with this during installation.

Installation

The installation process is no different than on any other machine. You can follow the Installation guide from the wiki.

Bootloader

The G75x devices boot using UEFI rather than MBR. In my experience using gummiboot or rEFInd will give you the least hassle to get your bootloader up and running, especially if you are going for a dual-boot setup like I did. Both will automatically detect your Windows bootloader and add a correct boot menu entry. I find GRUB to be rather complicated to configure correctly for UEFI but the choice is yours.

Graphics driver and kernel compilation

I strongly recommend using the proprietary NVIDIA drivers. Furthermore I needed to either keep using the nomodeset in the kernel parameters of my bootloader or recompiling the kernel with the parameter. I went for the latter option. Edit your /etc/mkinitcpio.conf file with the editor of your choice to include the nomodeset parameter and then recompile using the following command: 

# mkinitcpio -p linux

Keyboard backlight

For me, the keyboard backlight was disabled/off out of the box. You can use the appropriate multimedia keys to manipulate the backlight or install the asus-kbd-backlight package for control from the command line. Install the package from the AUR and hook it into systemd: 

# systemctl daemon-reload
# systemctl start asus-kbd-backlight.service
# systemctl enable asus-kbd-backlight.service

Usage is very straight-forward: 

$ asus-kbd-backlight up
$ asus-kbd-backlight down
$ asus-kbd-backlight max
$ asus-kbd-backlight off
$ asus-kbd-backlight night
$ asus-kbd-backlight 2
$ asus-kbd-backlight show

Presentations

I suppose this is more of a general Arch laptop issue but I figured it might be interesting to some folks. Install the xorg-xrandr package or use graphical packages like arandr. Check the docs of the packages for further info.

Final remarks

The trackpad works out of the box with the newer Linux kernels. Have fun running Arch on your ASUS G75x!