In follow up to this post I have remastered a daily build of Ubuntu 12.04, Precise Pangolin.
I have made a copy publicly available for those with one of these graphics cards. Please keep in mind it is an alpha release of 12.04
The gma500 should be working out of the box and works well live, and you can use a persistent home directory to preserve user data across boots.
Make a file in the root directory of any partition or your flash drive (after making a live flash drive from the iso)
# this will make a 1 Gb file for storage, increase / decrease the count as needed
dd if=/dev/zero of=./home-rw bs=1M count=1000
Make a file system on the file
mkfs.ext4 home-rw
mke2fs 1.41.14 (22-Dec-2010)
home-rw is not a block special device.
# Answer ‘yes’ here
Proceed anyway? (y,n) y
Remove the reserved blocks
tune2fs -m 0 -L home-rw home-rw
If you select the persistent option at the boot menu, the file system will then automatically be mounted at /home by the casper scripts.
If you install it, however, you would need to make some (minor) modifications.
using any editor, open /etc/default/grub
Change the line – GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT=”quiet splash” to
GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="poulsbo.blacklist=yes console=tty1"
And then update grub
sudo update-grub
The iso and md5sum are here:
Not completly working, to see the screen I have to switch between console with F1 and F7. Any suggestion to see the screen directly?
Hey guys, the old 915resolution program needs only a few extra lines to be useful in a Poulsbo/Cedarview situation. After that, you an run the program to add a bogus resolution that matches your monitor. If you follow this with a ‘modprobe uvesafb mode_option=1366×768-32′, you then get a /dev/fbo that car run the fbdev_drv.so of xorg. Ubuntu can be a little picky about allowing this, but it is worth doing. You will find that this arrangement works surprisingly well, much better than with the vesa.so driver. I have been reading the psb_gfx code in the kernel source, and, even if it works, which I doubt Alan Cox can demonstrate anywhere, it won’t be any faster or better than the above arrangemen. Also, font resolution problems with uvesafb or the vesa driver are a matter of sizing and boldening the fonts used.
Willing to send you Linux desktop images using my system.
P. S. The Intel D2700MUD board with the 3600 video chip runs a 900 score on the peacekeeper benchmark for google chrome, which is much better than under Windows. The latest Linux kernel says the gma500 module is for the gma500/600/3600 series, and you can tell from ‘modinfo gma500′ that the module scans the 8086 address for the 3600. Except the screen goes blank, and the system stops scanning for input, whereas 915resolution plus uvesafb with gma500 disabled yields a functioning /dev/fb0.
Hi, i have an issue.
i have a dell mini 1010 with the gma500 graphics card, and i would like to run bactrack r2, but i havent been able to run it. is there any workaround i can use or any way you could help me get this Os running??
thanks in advance!! :D
@Christopher Kruthoff – Backtrack is going to be tough as they provide a custom kernel. I would file a bug report similar to the ones I files with Ubuntu and Fedora – https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/linux/+bug/899244
Only difference is the kernel module is called gma500_gfx in later kernels.
The other option you have is to download the backtrack kernel source and compile it yourself.
Now you can have a special Knoppix home directory along with all of your other user accounts. Similar to other persistent home directory methods, this method uses this directory in place of a ramdisk for /home/knoppix, so any changes you make or files you create are always saved—without running any extra commands.