Acer Aspire One AO751
I have been one of the frustrated owners of an Intel GMA 500 card – see how kick your friends face gma500 for details.
Support for this card in Linux has historically been poor, at best, and X typically fails when you boot most distros. For example, the GMA 500 is excluded from Fedora Intel Test Days .
Many people have resorted to attempting to reverse engineer various closed source (PSB and IEGD) and more recently the EMGD driver with mixed results. Support has been best for Ubuntu, and spotty at best for other distros.
In February of this year , Alan Cox started working on a driver gma500: Intel GMA500 staging driver and I have been using this driver on Gentoo for the past few months.
The advantage of the psb-gfx driver is that it is in the Linux kernel and performance is quite acceptable. The driver is 2D, No 3D, Xv, Hardware Accelerated Video.
With some minor changes to the kernel configuration, the psb-gfx driver should soon be working, at native resolution, out of the box, without any end user configuration in both Fedora and Ubuntu.
Note: When starting the live CD/Flash drive, X is distorted when it starts. You need to re-start X (log out an the log in screen is fine, ctrl-alt-backspace in Fedora). Once you install, it helps to disable the boot splash.
Thank you to Alan Cox for developing the psb-gfx driver and to the Fedora and Ubuntu teams for making the adjustments to the default distribution kernel.
Screen shots – click on the images for a larger picture.
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but, what steps should be done to enable the psb-gfx driver in my gma500 netbook with ubuntu 11.10 ? Could you help, sir?
@Nowboy – On Ubuntu 11.10 you need to build a custom kernel, 3.0.4 or higher.
http://bodhizazen.net/Tutorials/kernel
> Support has been best for Ubuntu, and spotty at best for other distros
I thought the best support was actually in Jolicloud, but I’ve never tried it.
Alan’s comments on the in-kernel driver suggest that it will still have no 3D or hardware-accelerated video support when it leaves staging (has this already happened? I haven’t been following the latest on LKML). Given these constraints are GMA500 owners still going to be better served by Ubuntu 9.10, which has good support?
@Matthew Fernandez
The GMA500 is confusing to follow, there have been several open and closed source drivers and many attempts to reverse engineer the driver.
The psb_gfx driver has both advantages and disadvantages. The major advantages are, IMO, that it is part of the mainstream kernel and thus easier to maintain. I also prefer open source drivers. The final advantage is that because it is part of the linux kernel, it will work (in theory) on ALL DISTROS.
The disadvantage is, as you say, currently it is 2d only.
If you would like a run-down of all the options, including uvesafb (which I used before the psb_gfx) see:
https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Poulsbo
https://wiki.ubuntu.com/HardwareSupportComponentsVideoCardsPoulsbo
Which distro and why are a matter of personal choice, what you use your computer for, and what bugs or annoyances you are willing to tolerate.
Personally, as you can guess from my post, I have been using gentoo on my netbook for some time as gentoo has a number of advantages (IMO). I moved to gentoo so I could use open source drivers, namely uvesfb and (started) migrated to psb_gfx when it hit testing 10 months ago. Been using psb_gfx since kernel 3.0.4 .
http://en.gentoo-wiki.com/wiki/Acer_Aspire_One_AO751h
With the psb_gfx I am considering ubuntu 12.04 and fedora 17. Unity works very nice out of the box, the next gnome should support 2d. Both are in development, so probably not ready for prime time. YMMV.
i heard windows 8 will have “secure boot”. this causes you to not be able to dual boot. bill gates s ucks ballz.
@jonny rocket
Your comment is a bit off topic, but I would not hit the panic button yet =)
First, I strongly suggest you purchase hardware with Linux preinstalled, there is no need to buy Windows, let along windows preinstalled. If you purchase with linux preinstalled all your problems with windows are solved.
http://www.linuxfoundation.org/publications/making-uefi-secure-boot-work-with-open-platforms
Thanks for posting this. I’ve got a question for you: I’ve taken on a bit of a project. My plan is to turn a netbook into a tablet (mostly for fun, partly because I don’t want to pay $500 for a high end device). Unfortunately, I seem to have purchased a GMA 500 tablet before doing all my research. I want to run either Ubuntu or Android 3.x or 4.x on it. My question is this: (assuming I can compile this. I’ve never done anything this technical before) should this driver work on Android since, technically, it is Linux based? Or do you think I should save myself the headache, resell, and buy something more Android friendly like an ASUS? I went for this one because it has 3g, gps, and a 720p monitor, but if I can’t get the drivers for 3g or the gps, and it won’t be able to play at the correct resolution, I may want to just forget about it. Thanks in advance for any advice you can give me.
Gary
Hi
Ever heard of reactOS.org? It is worth checking out.
Cheers Jan
@Jan Girke – tried it a few times, what is so nice about it ? Does it work with the GMA500 ?
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