# Asus Zenbook Prime UX31A: Chicony Electronics Webcam & other



## stetus (Mar 25, 2013)

Hi,

I'm considering switching from Gentoo/Arch Linux to FreeBSD. I own an Asus Zenbook Prime UX31A with following webcam:

```
ID 04f2:b330 Chicony Electronics Co., Ltd Asus 720p CMOS webcam
```
I couldn't find the exact model in the wiki (there is a similar one, "CNF7129", though) - does anyone have experience with this webcam?

And is there anyone who tried FreeBSD on that notebook and can share his knowledge? I guess it will be pretty hard to get things like the keyboard backlight working.


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## mav@ (Mar 25, 2013)

I am typing this on UX31A running FreeBSD head. I have been using it with FreeBSD for about 9 months already.

Webcam is working fine with webcamd in ports. Keyboard backlight and sound volume controls are implemented by the acpi_asus_wmi kernel module and working fine. Known problems: 1) Screen brightness control doesn't work (I believe because of old KMS drivers), 2) HDMI video output doesn't work (screen and VGA are fine), 3) SD card reader doesn't work.


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## segfault (Mar 25, 2013)

I as well have this ultrabook and love it but really miss having FreeBSD on my laptop. I had trouble getting past the EFI boot so ended up settling with Fedora 

How do you boot into your system? Did you use another OS first and set up GRUB2 or something similar? Have you had any luck with rEFInd?

Would you consider writing a HowTo on setting this computer up for the community?


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## stetus (Mar 25, 2013)

Hi mav@,

Very cool - thank you very much!

Too bad the SD card reader isn't working, but I think I'll give it a try anyhow.


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## c_geier (Mar 25, 2013)

@mav@, how is the battery life?


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## mav@ (Mar 26, 2013)

segfault said:
			
		

> I as well have this ultrabook and love it but really miss having FreeBSD on my laptop. I had trouble getting past the EFI boot so ended up settling with Fedora
> 
> How do you boot into your system? Did you use another OS first and set up GRUB2 or something similar? Have you had any luck with rEFInd?



The specifics/bug of this laptop is that BIOS doesn't want to boot OS from GPT partition without using UEFI, while FreeBSD UEFI loader is still in development. After set of experiments I've found solution by installing FreeBSD on MBR partition, which BIOS supports without requiring UEFI. Good for me, I had no plans to keep preinstalled Windows 7 alive and so was free to choose partitioning scheme.


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## mav@ (Mar 26, 2013)

c_geier said:
			
		

> @mav@, how is the battery life?



With full screen brightness (I can't control it) and WiFi enabled it is about 4 hours of low activity or about 1.5 hours of full load. With WiFi disabled it is about 5 hours of low activity. With lid closed ACPI battery status promises 8 hours.


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## segfault (Mar 26, 2013)

Amazing. Does the touchpad swipe scrolling work?


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## mav@ (Mar 27, 2013)

segfault said:
			
		

> Amazing. Does the touchpad swipe scrolling work?



I think it's not. For me it works just as two button mouse. Quite ugly one IMHO. Because buttons are sensor, I can't feel their edges by touch.


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## stetus (Mar 28, 2013)

mav@ said:
			
		

> I think it's not. For me it works just as two button mouse. Quite ugly one IMHO. Because buttons are sensor, I can't feel their edges by touch.



I can't get it working either. I guess I will switch back to Linux: Touchpad without scrolling makes the whole system unusable.


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## segfault (Mar 29, 2013)

How did you get your wifi working? Mine doesn't seem to detect it.


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## stetus (Mar 29, 2013)

segfault said:
			
		

> How did you get your wifi working? Mine doesn't seem to detect it.



S*o*r*r*y, I didn't get so far. It made no sense for me to work on wifi without a properly working touchpad.


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## mav@ (Mar 29, 2013)

segfault said:
			
		

> How did you get your wifi working? Mine doesn't seem to detect it.



Sorry, forgot to mention, I am using this patch with my HEAD: http://people.freebsd.org/~mav/iwn6235.patch
It seems to apply to 9-STABLE, but I have never tried it there. Also there is a bug in WiFi firmware that crashes it when connecting to 40MHz channels. So I have -ht40 ifconfig option in my rc.conf to work around it.


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## stetus (May 27, 2013)

*S*illy question: is there a chance that the device will get (fully) supported in the future, is someone working on that?


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