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Dual Booting Windows 10 & Ubuntu 15.10 on G752VY (inc. Nvidia graphics drivers)

RockJake28
Level 7
So I picked up the G752VY and spent a whole day getting it to boot and work properly in Ubuntu.
This guide isn't 100% complete (as I'm still figuring out how to get sound to work through headphones properly) but it will get it installed for you so you can fine tune the rest of the system yourself

(Credit to this thread for giving me a starting point.
I'll be using some material from there and changing the necessary points.

Part I: Dual Booting

1. Make sure your BIOS is version 211 or later

In order to be able to see the SSD when you go to install you need to be able to change a setting that is only available in v211 or later. You can check which version you are running by rebooting, holding ESC to bring up the boot menu and entering setup mode. The version of the BIOS will be displayed on the first page.

Flashing the BIOS is terrifying, so I'd personally recommend using the WinFlash utility that's pre-installed on the system (this can be downloaded if it isn't).

You can get the BIOS v211 and the WinFlash utility from here under the BIOS and BIOS-Utility headings respectively.

From there you simply need to extract the file from the downloaded BIOS, run WinFlash and select the extracted file. (The BIOS can be found automatically by the software, but I prefer to have manual control over this). Everything else is automated.

There is a known problem whereby this BIOS takes a LONG time to boot. v212 was released today and is reported to have not fixed this problem, but I am not able to confirm this.

2. Change the SATA Configuration

Now you have BIOS v211 (or later), reboot holding down ESC and enter setup mode again. Scroll along to he Advanced tab using the arrow keys and down to SATA configuration. You should see an option called "SATA Mode Selection" and it will most likely be set to RAID. You will need to change this to AHCI.

Save these changes and exit.

3. Creating a partition

There are a number of ways this can be done and this is not my preferred way to do it (I'll add that in later) but it is by far the most straight forward for a first time dual booter whilst maintaining control.

Boot into windows and hover over the start button. Right-click and go to Disk management. Right click the main partition on the SSD that contains windows and shrink this by the amount you want for your Ubuntu installation (N.B. You will need to keep in mind that you will need swap space which defaults to the same size as your RAM for this method. E.g. If you want 100GB of space and have 32GB of RAM, then you will need to shrink the Windows partition by 132GB).

4. Turn-off Fast start up
I am not sure if this is essential but I read a few webpages that if you do not disable Fastboot and enter into a different OS, your system could potentially crash. To make it safe, I disabled it.

For those who doesn't want to bother going to an external link!
Go to Power Options from Control Panel.
Click Choose what the power buttons do.
Click Change settings that are currently unavailable.
Untick Turn on fast start up.

5. Download the Ubutnu Installation

Go the the Ubuntu site and download the ISO for the version of Ubuntu you want to install. This guide was written for Ubuntu 15.10, though hopefully the same steps can be followed for 16.04 LTS as it has better support for Skylake CPUs. I'll be waiting a few months to see what people's responses are before upgrading. If you use this guide with 16.10 and everything works, let me know.

6. Create bootable USB with Ubuntu ISO

Using Rufus you can create use a USB drive (I believe at least 2GB is required) that will allow you to boot into Ubuntu.

7. Boot into the USB

Reboot holding down escape and choose the USB drive you wrote Ubuntu to (make sure you use UEFI mode).
Choose Install without trying and carry out a normal installation choosing "Install alongside Windows".
If this doesn't work for some reason, try rebooting into the USB again, scroll down the Install Ubtunu and hit the E key. You will be shown some text, change the part that says "quiet splash" to "nomodeset".

8. Changing between Windows and Ubuntu

Unfortunately, with this method, in order to go back to using Windows you will need to revert Step 2 and come back to Ubuntu you will need to implement Step 2 again. If anyone has a solution to this, I welcome it, but I spend 99% of my time in Ubuntu so it's not particularly an issue.


Part II: Graphics Driver

This step is incredibly straight forward but yet took me hours of going through bad guides to figure out.

1. Boot until the logon screen
2. Open a terminal using Ctrl + Alt + F1
3. Disable lightdm using
 sudo service lightdm stop 
lightdm wil be a different service if you're using a differ flavour of ubuntu
4. Install the nvidia packages. The first one will change depending on which GPU you're using, this can be found using the first command

$ sudo ubuntu-drivers devices # Optional! To find which driver to use
== /sys/devices/pci0000:00/0000:00:01.0/0000:01:00.0 ==
model : GM204M [GeForce GTX 980M]
modalias : pci:v000010DEd00001617sv00001043sd00001CEDbc03sc00i00
vendor : NVIDIA Corporation
driver : xserver-xorg-video-nouveau - distro free builtin
driver : nvidia-352 - distro non-free recommended
driver : nvidia-352-updates - distro non-free

== cpu-microcode.py ==
driver : intel-microcode - distro non-free

$ sudo apt-get install nvidia-352
$ sudo apt-get install nvidia-common
$ sudo apt-get install nvidia-modprobe

5. Reboot
6. Use
 $ lspci -v | grep -A 14 NVIDIA 
and check your driver for the GPU is "nvidia"
If it isn't then try running
 $ sudo update-initramfs -u 
and reboot again.

Part III: Other stuff & Known issues

1. Fixing Screen brightness dimming

Install xbacklight executing the code below.
 $ sudo apt-get install xbacklight 

Now go to your keyboard shortcut settings and add 2 shortcuts.
One of the shortcut's command will be as follows for dimmer:

xbacklight -10

and the other should be as follows for brighter

xbacklight +10

Set the shortcuts to whatever you want

2. Headphone issues

Firstly, keep options "snd-hda-intel model=asus-mode5" added to /etc/modprobe.d/alsa-base.conf

Disable pulseaudio's auto spawning capabilities and kill all instances


$ echo autospawn = no >> /etc/pulse/client.conf
$ killall pulseaudio


check if there is anything else using the sound card


$ sudo fuser -v /dev/snd/*


make sure you kill anything that comes up and stop it from respawning too, how to do this will depend on what the program is.

Install alsa-tools-gui


$ sudo apt-get install alsa-tools-gui
$ sudo hdajackretask


When the GUI loads, click "Show unconnected pins" and override the first unconnected pin to be a headphone jack and apply the settings. Daemonise pulseaudio puslseaudio -D and test the sound, repeat this for all unconnected ports until you find the right one.

Once you have found the one the correct jack, click "Install boot override" and restart to make sure everything works. Now edit the pulseaudio config file and remove the line added earlier to allow respawning again.

Until you reboot, volume can only modified using alsamixer rather than the usual GUI component. After rebooting, everything goes back to normal.
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