Ultramarine Setup Guide

A friendly guide for setting up Ultramarine on ASUS laptops

Newcomers should start by reading the Intro guide.

For general Ultramarine setup and usage information, see the official Ultramarine guide.

Warning

This guide is maintained by the community. If you find an issue with the Ultramarine documentation, please contribute a fix or report it to the community.

Contents

• About Ultramarine Versions
• Post-Installation
• Setup
  • Asusctl
  • ROG Control Center
  • Graphics Switching
• Optional Steps
  • Enabling Secure Boot
    • CachyOS Kernel
      • Install CachyOS Kernel

About Ultramarine Versions

This guide is written for the current stable release of Ultramarine. Ultramarine is based on Fedora and follows the same release pattern.

You need to keep Ultramarine up to date. If you are two versions behind, your operating system is no longer supported with updates or security fixes.

For example, if Ultramarine 44 is the current stable release, Ultramarine 42 is unsupported.

Post-Installation

Follow the Ultramarine post-installation guide for useful steps such as installing NVIDIA drivers.

Setup

Asusctl

This section covers installing asusctl and its supporting software. It enables controls for ASUS ROG hardware on the laptop.

sudo dnf install asusctl

Important

Power profiles: asusd manages platform profiles and CPU EPP settings itself via the ACPI platform_profile interface. Running an external power profiles daemon (such as power-profiles-daemon or tuned) alongside asusd can cause race conditions over /sys/firmware/acpi/platform_profile and CPU EPP preferences. You have two options:

1. Let asusd manage profiles and disable the external daemon. Since Ultramarine is Fedora-based, tuned is the default power profile daemon. Note that KDE Plasma’s PowerDevil can respawn power-profiles-daemon through DBus activation even after it is disabled, so be sure to mask it instead:

sudo systemctl mask --now power-profiles-daemon.service
# or, if you use tuned:
sudo systemctl mask --now tuned.service tuned-ppd.service

2. Keep the external daemon and disable asusd’s profile management by setting the following to false in /etc/asusd/asusd.ron:

change_platform_profile_on_ac: false,
change_platform_profile_on_battery: false,
platform_profile_linked_epp: false,

A common way to switch profiles is binding the Fn+F5 key to asusctl profile next Available profiles vary by system, see asusctl profile list.

ROG Control Center

ROG Control Center is a GUI tool for configuring some aspects of asusctl. It is available as a separate package:

sudo dnf install asusctl-rog-gui

Reboot after installing asusctl:

sudo systemctl reboot

Note

ASUS releases new products every year, so not every device is guaranteed to work with the current Fedora kernel. Depending on your device, you may need a kernel with newer ASUS patches, such as the ASUS Armoury driver available in Linux 6.19 and later, or the CachyOS kernel. This is optional and depends on your device and needs.

Graphics Switching

See GPU Switching for how to manage the dGPU and MUX.

Optional Steps

Enabling Secure Boot

The recommended and easiest way to sign the kernel, whether you switched to systemd-boot, installed NVIDIA drivers, or changed the kernel, is to use sbctl.

CachyOS Kernel

Note

Newer devices may require a custom kernel with additional patches. The CachyOS kernel includes newer patches and can be tried if the stock kernel does not support your device properly.

Install CachyOS Kernel

Ultramarine provides umcli to simplify switching to the CachyOS kernel:

um tweaks enable cachyos-kernel

Note

If Secure Boot is enabled, sign the new kernel with sbctl.