A lot of these ultrabook seem to be defected, my company got four ux32vd with a lot of different manufacturing problem. We encountred:

• Bad backlighting (4/4)
• Pixel broken (1/4)
• SSD defective (4/4)
• USB3 port defective (1/4)
• Speaker welding defective (1/4)

However ASUS assistance is really good and they replaced/repaired our notebooks quickly

Fortunately In Italy ASUS accept Windows 7 license refund, you need a bank account and you must send an email to begin the procedure to info_AT_asus_DOT_it

This ultrabook is sold with a 500gb 2.5“ HDD (replaceable) and a 32gb (officially 24gb) SSD welded on the mainboard. I suggest you to erase the content of your HDD and SSD to install in a better way your main operating system.

• 2gb of ram (DDR3 1600Mhz) is welded on the mainboard and isn't replaceable, the others 2gb are on the only one bank available and can be replaced at least with an 8gb module.
• Touchpad is big and is really responsive, however it's a clickpad (I don't like it!)
• Keyboard have the backlit (really nice!)
• Battery isn't really big and screen backlight consume a lot, with a low backlight you can double the battery life (about 5-6 hours, maybe 7 with a light use).
• ASUS have placed a proprietary mini-vga connector instead of a better display-port, at least we have a “standard” HDMI port.
• Audio connector is an hybrid microphone+headphone, I tried a Nokia headset and both microphone and earpieces works fine in Linux, other OSs not tested.
• nVidia Optimus can't be disabled from “BIOS” you need an OS able to manage it otherwise you could have problems with the GUI and battery life.
• WiFi network card and internal antennas use a smaller connector then usual, take care of it if you plan to replace it (maybe to use Mac OS X)

Currently I maintaining the official page on Debian wiki, please refer to that page.

I tried to boot Lion and Mountain Lion, the first one won't boot at all, the second works with some problem.

I advice you to prepare an USB key using unibeast from tonymacx86 Boot of 10.8 image wouldn't work, so you need to disable xhci (usb3 support) from bios and boot with -x option (there are some problems with HD4000 and nVidia 620m)

Not yet done, maybe when I've more time :)

It works fine without problems, please be careful when you boot the installer, you MUST use the UEFI option.

• Latest bios for AUS ZenBook
• iFixIt teardown