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ASUS TUF Gaming A17 FA706IH-TUF706IH

Post by mfreeman » Fri Dec 18, 2020 3:22 am

I bought this ASUS TUF Gaming A17 FA706IH-TUF706IH laptop this week, as my old 6-year-old laptop was showing its age and I wanted something with higher specs that’d last me another 6 or 7 years at least . I saw posts that people had success with running Linux on the ASUS TUF Gaming A17 laptop. Turns out it was an older model with slightly different hardware. I installed Mint 20 on it, but have had several problems, some of which I’ve solved with extensive Googling (such as complete failure to start any graphics card, and suspend being woken up by a mouse movement), other’s I’m stumped on. Here are the problems I have left (in priority order):

1. It won’t completely shut down. It gets all the way to completing the shutdown on the terminal (All the messages look good with quiet splash removed), it turns off the screen, and I can hear the hard drive park. But all of the indicator lights stay on and I have to force-hold the power button for a bit to get it to turn off completely.

2. One of the video cards doesn’t seem to function. It has an integrated Radeon RX Vega 7, and a discrete NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1660 Ti. I managed to get the integrated graphics to work by inserting amdgpu.dc=1 into the grub startup line, but after following all instructions and all troubleshooting for similar issues, all I can get from the NVIDIA card is a black screen. I know something’s happening in the background, because I can still type my password on the black screen and the hard drive does the same thing as when I log in with the functional integrated graphics. I can also control-alt-F1 into a terminal and see the logged in processes running. Just no graphical display. I can be ok with the integrated card for now, but I’ve read that the only card that drives the HDMI port is the NVIDIA card. So if I ever need to use it for a presentation or want to plug it into a TV for a movie, I’m stuck. And it would be nice to be able to use the extra hardware I paid for.

3. Minimal control of the keyboard backlighting. This isn’t a big issue, but it would be nice to figure out. By default, the keyboard backlighting does this constant pulsing cycle through all possible colors over and over. In Cinnamon’s power applet, there is a slider that can dim the pulsing colors or turn it off completely, but that’s it. I’d like to be able to have a steady, single-color, dim but present backlighting under the keyboard. I’ve found some tools that are supposed do that, but none are for this model, some don’t work, and another that looks like it’s made for something closest to my system, but has to be compiled into a kernel module (I’ve never been very successful with compiling) and comes with dire warnings of possible permanent damage to hardware, so I’m not willing to try that just yet.

Other than those issues, everything seems to work perfectly. Ironically, I was most worried about the wifi, since that’s the one piece of hardware that’s often giving people trouble in newer laptops, but that works flawlessly.

If anyone has any suggestions for any of these issues, I would love to hear them! Thank you!

Last edited by LockBot on Wed Dec 28, 2022 7:16 am, edited 1 time in total.
Reason: Topic automatically closed 6 months after creation. New replies are no longer allowed.

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ASUS TUF DASH F15 (2022)

This page contains instructions and tips for configuring Arch Linux on the ASUS TUF DASH F15 Laptop.

Note: This page covers the 2022 DASH F15 with model numbers FX517ZC, FX517ZE, FX517ZM, FX517ZR. It DOES NOT cover the 2021 DASH F15 (11th Gen CPU & RTX3070) with model numbers FX516PC, FX516PE, FX516PM, FX516PR.

Accessibility

This laptop uses the standard American Megatrends UEFI interface, it is very bright and has both simple and advanced mode ( F7 to swap between them). It has touchpad support in both modes though scrolling does not work in advanced mode meaning you need to use the keyboard to navigate the longer menus.

Simple mode provides basic functions in a visual manner using defined box areas the user can click to open a sub menu. Most normal operations can be done here using either the keyboard or touchpad. This mode should not be difficult for visually impaired users to navigate.

Advanced mode is a more traditional menu driven layout. It is simply text on a coloured background and while the touchpad does work, scrolling does not so the keyboard must be used for most menus. This mode might be difficult for users with a visual impairment to navigate.

Installation

This section contains instructions for installing and configuring Arch Linux

ASUS Linux

The ASUS Linux stack provides users of this laptop with a great many ASUS specific functions, to name a few:

• Battery Charge Limit,
• Multiplexer (GPU) Controls,
• Panel Overdrive,
• Much more.

It is highly recommended to install these tools for the optimal experience on these laptops.

Keyboard RGB control

The keyboard does not have RGB support, as is stated on Asus’ support website. It does, however, have support for simple lighting effects such as strobing. This function is not implemented yet in Linux, and there is an ongoing issue at https://gitlab.com/asus-linux/asusctl/-/issues/278.

Firmware

Other than changing the boot device order, no firmware changes are required for this laptop.

Secure Boot

Manual Setup

Firmware will allow you to easily put Secure Boot into Setup/Custom mode so you can deploy your own keys with keytool .

There is no need to reset the TPM state to put firmware into setup mode, and also, if you have a usb thumbdrive with your CA files, or they are placed inside your ESP, you can deploy these certificates directly from the firmware as well.

Also, right after deploying your CA information, this laptop firmware will delete any additional EFI external drive boot entry it might have configured(USB, CD, PXE).

Automated Setup

If you don’t want the hassle of manually handling keys then sbctl fully supports this laptop. See Unified Extensible Firmware Interface/Secure Boot#Assisted process with sbctl for instructions.

Warning: Grub users must first reinstall grub with the tpm module and shim disabled before enabling Secure Boot. Failure to do so will likely render the system unbootable until you disable secure boot in firmware. The following command will achieve this

# grub-install --target=x86_64-efi --efi-directory=/boot --bootloader-id=GRUB --modules="tpm" --disable-shim-lock

D-Bus notifications

Notifications provide feedback when a setting is changed using asusctl and are especially useful when a setting has been bound to a custom keyboard shortcut. They are provided by the asus-notify.service user unit which needs to be started/enabled.

Tips and tricks

To maximize the battery life, follow the general tips at power management.

Battery charge limit

Setting a limit to the battery charge can be useful to preserve its longevity when the laptop is used as a static workstation for long period of times. Set your preferred limit (in percent, from 20 to 100) using:

60% is usually considered a stable charge state for lithium-based batteries.

Power profile

The power profile controls three settings: CPU scaling (only on Intel CPUs), Boost mode and fans speed. By default, three profiles are provided: quiet , balanced and performance . Custom profiles can be defined.

Fn+F5 is automatically bound to switch power profile. This will imitate the way the original ASUS service works on Windows. Notifications should be enabled in order to know which profile is selected each time the shortcut is pressed. A specific profile can be manually selected using:

Disabling turbo boost

While not necessarily saving power, some user prefer to disable turbo boost for smoother power delivery and less heat. To temporarily disable boost, execute the following:

# echo 0 > /sys/devices/system/cpu/cpufreq/boost

Or use the power profiles from asusctl to handle this automatically, as explained in #Power profile.

Function Keys

These is the list of functions keys and how they are handled by the system. Some of them like Fn+F2 are not visible to libinput debug-events meaning they are hardwired or lack of additional implementation to better handle them since they behave differently on Windows.

The first four keys on the following table are the dedicate buttons located right above F1 to F4 and since they are dedicated multimedia keys, Fn combination isn’t needed.

Key	Visible?	Marked?	Effect
Volume Down	Yes	Yes	XF86AudioLowerVolume .
Volume Up	Yes	Yes	XF86AudioRaiseVolume .
Mic Mute	Yes	Yes	F20 Function key.
Asus Key	Yes	No	KEY_PROG3 code 202 . This key has a generic stamp on it which is bound to Asus internal design.
Fn+F1	Yes	Yes	XF86AudioMute .
Fn+F2	No	Yes	Lower keyboard brightness directly through hardware.
Fn+F3	No	Yes	Raise keyboard brightness directly through hardware. These two keyboard brightness behave differently on Windows, changing also led style/patterns.
Fn+F4	Yes	No	KEY_PROG4 code 203 . Function named «Aura» which does not explain it’s meaning
Fn+F5	No	No	A key with a Fan icon on it, which on Windows is used to change fan profiles. Does not work however, a merge request to fix that is already in place
Fn+F6	Yes	Yes	Shortcut to WinKey + Shift + s , which is the screenshot crop hotkey for Windows. Keycap logo makes sense in some way.
Fn+F7	Yes	Yes	XF86MonBrightnessDown .
Fn+F8	Yes	Yes	XF86MonBrightnessUp .
Fn+F9	Yes	Yes	Shortcut to WinKey + p , which is the external monitor tool for Windows. Keycap logo makes sense.
Fn+F10	Yes	No	Key maps to F20 (press and release) and after that a sequence of AltGr + KEY_ZENKAKUHANKAKU code 85 keystroke. Logo seems to be a crossed touchpad but prints out this unusual sequence.
Fn+F11	Yes	Yes	KEY_SLEEP code 142 . Little Zzz on key makes it meaningful.
Fn+F12	No	No	Key should be Airplane mode but does not show on libinput, neither disables network interfaces.
Fn+Arrow Down	Yes	Yes	KEY_PAGEDOWN code 109 .
Fn+Arrow Up	Yes	Yes	KEY_PAGEUP code 104 .
Fn+Arrow Left	Yes	Yes	KEY_HOME code 102 . This laptop has a dedicated Home key at the top of the numpad, and this key combination for it as well.
Fn+Arrow Right	Yes	Yes	KEY_END code 107 .
Fn+Dell	Yes	Yes	KEY_INSERT code 110 . This laptop has these dual keys around the numpad, some of them repeating keys that are elsewhere.
Fn+Pause	Yes	Yes	No effect so all. Pressing Fn+Pause or Pause it will issue KEY_PAUSE code 119 on both cases
Fn+PrtSc	Yes	Yes	It will send BOTH keys, PrtSc and SysRq in that sequence, no matter if using Fn+PrtSc or PrtSc . Really weird.
Fn+Home	Yes	Yes	KEY_END code 107 .
Fn+Numpad Enter	Yes	Yes	XF86Calculator .
Fn+Right Ctrl	Yes	Yes	KEY_COMPOSE code 127 .
Fn+Winkey	Yes	No	Issuing this key combination will lock Winkey into sending KEY_UNKNOWN code 240 , until you issue Fn+Winkey again to change this behavior.

See also

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