Asus Express Gate Cloud (can I use it?)

[daaaaang]

I have an Asus U33JC-A1 laptop with two power buttons. One is the regular power button; the other is this "express gate cloud" button. Two months back, I gave this no thought whatsoever as I excitedly installed Gentoo on my machine.

The second power button currently functions almost identically to my current power button. The only difference is the ASUS logo right after I press it (there is a pretty rainbow ASUS animation that does not happen at all with the regular button). After that, it functions identically to the regular power button.

As I understand it, this used to be some sort of simple GUI with basic internet access and a calendar. Of course, I've installed Gentoo, and it goes from zero to sixty in about fifteen seconds, so I have absolutely no need of a GUI that boots a little faster.

But there is this second power button, and it bugs me, and I want to make it do something neat. I have two questions:

• How can I check which button has been pressed? If I'm to make the second button boot differently, I'll need to know that it was pressed. I don't even know where to start figuring that one out.
  
• What should I install? I mean, I could just install a dumbed-down Gentoo with fewer applications and a bare-minimum kernel, but come on: that's lame. I'll do that if I don't get better ideas, but there's gotta be something really awesome I can do with this. Any suggestions?

Thanks!
Matt

[BradN]

"How can I check which button has been pressed?"

Reverse engineer the original software or the BIOS, or find someone that's already done that. I don't think there are any other reasonable options.

[carvajr]

Hi daaaaang

I'm about to buy an asus U33JC like yours, and I was wondering if you got hdmi (with sound?) to work. I really need it.

Also, how did you deal with optimus? Did you disable the intel gpu via the bios option to use the nvidia proprietary drivers? Or did you disable the nvidia via the acpi_call module? Do these "tricks" work fine?

Did you have to do any fancy stuff to make everything work?

I really liked this laptop, and it is on sale here, making it the cheapest 13/14 inch laptop one can buy around here.

Thanks a lot
Washington

[abcef]

Hi,

I have the asus f6a (core 2 due G45 montevina) . It was originally installed with windows vista 64 and express gate (the former version with firefox).

i now installed win 7 64 on a new hard disk. there is no express gate cloud version for my computer.

I think this is because i dont have the sandy bridge processor to fit with the EFI partition creation -- i hope i am wrong.

Anyway with express gate cloud the second power button stays unused....

I can install the previous version of express gate (firefox) and it operates with the second power button.


So, is it possible to instal the express gate cloud ?, is it specific for a computer ?

If not , can i creat the EFI partition ?

If yes, how ?

For daaaaang the author , here is the source code for asus express gate cloud from asus site (select linux):

http://www.asus.com/Eee/Eee_PC/Eee_PC_1215T/#download