This year I purchased an AlienWare MX14… I have waited for one for along time and well this one is lovely… dual hard drives one 32GB SSD and another 1TB SATA drive… Two Video Cards… 32GB of RAM capacity… Three Monitor plugs yes I said three, HDMI, VGA, Mini Display Port… anyways drooling time over and to get to the nitty gritty…
I love Linux (shock there right) and whilst I was happy to have Windows8 come with the machine as I love testing out any new Operating System I really need to have a Linux base on the machine as well for my main development and well most of my applications run in Gnome. But the problem first came at trying to run Debian on it from the get go I had Video Card Driver errors I tried various things and even took it to the pros aka Eric Anholt and he confirmed my suspicions there was not much I could do as there was alot of low level problems. Though he did recommended trying Fedora with BumbleBee. Yes I know Nvidia and Linux equals trouble I had sworn off them since the troubles in the late 90s with Linux however I had no choice with this laptop. It was either AlienWare & Nvidia or stick with my HP Envy which to be honest I was over considering the troubles I have had and I wanted something more powerful… Seems like I have been buying a new Laptop every 1.5 years in the past 6 years…
As we in the Linux world know Fedora these days is where you see the bleeding edge Desktop changes occurring. So my AlienWare will be running Fedora and I have been concerned about how I would get the lighting effects working in Fedora.. I love my crazy AlienWare back lights…
So to cut the blog short after some searching on the internet I found some Linux drivers… due to travels I wont be able to have time to get to play with them until end May and when I do I will blog about my experience with getting all the effects running. But for now if your interested here are some of the links I have found, have fun and send me a link if you had any problems or got it working 😀
AlienFX Lite
http://forum.notebookreview.com/alienware/458528-alienfx-lite-linux-windows-alienfx-tool.html
https://github.com/r0ttten/AlienFxLite
You Tube Tutorial for AlienFX
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3SPJAFx5Meo
Arch Linux AlienWare driver page
https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Alienware_M11x
BumbleBee
http://bumblebee-project.org/