GMA500 (Poulsbo) gma500_gfx

[TakeLifeEasy]

That is interesting as I have always thought Fedora had improved the performance. This is worrying, it looks like this chipset may never work well with Gnome 3 Is anyone away of any work going on trying to improve and/or testing this? Just wondering if there is a PPA I can subscribe to to help further testing?

[mikewhatever]

That is interesting as I have always thought Fedora had improved the performance. This is worrying, it looks like this chipset may never work well with Gnome 3 Is anyone away of any work going on trying to improve and/or testing this? Just wondering if there is a PPA I can subscribe to to help further testing?

Indeed, the llvmpipe performance has improved, most notably on multicore 64bit CPUs, none of which applies to Intel's Z5xx Atom series. Z5xx Atoms are just not powerful enough for GPU emulation.

Gnome3 and Compiz/Unity are not suitable for the gma500 based machines, kind of like not every key fits every lock. Modern Linux desktops are being geared to OpenGL 3+ capable hardware. Luckily, there are other options that work decently well.

There aren't any PPAs worth subscribing to, but you might want to wach out once in a while for news on gma500 and Linux. Keep the expectations real though, as there aren't many incentives for anyone to work on a proper driver.

[mpw]

Hello,

I already got much help from here. Thanks for that. Once again I have a question:

I'm using Ubuntu 12.04 on a Sony Vaio Series X with a gma500 ofc. Now I'd like to use an external monitor. When I connect it and reboot, the image is set to 1024x768 on both montiors and the image is mirrored. Is there any change to switch the internal and external monitors to different resolutions and expand the desktop on both screen?

Which is the maximum resolution the gma500 is cappable of? My internal montior uses 1367x768.

Bye
MPW

[Paul Debrione]

Hi there,

regarding 12.10 and the GMA500 chipset, I take it that it's basically a 'don't bother situation'?

I just downloaded 12.10 and installed it on an Acer One A0751h. It installed perfectly and it does look sweet as long as I don't actually do anything with the computer. It is staggeringly slow, I mean 286 slow. It's running a tiny anemic 1.3ghz Atom with 2 GB of memory and the cpu is running flat out. when I look for a video card in the 'Details' app it's reported as 'Unknown'. The OS reports that there is no graphics card and so all the screen handling is being done by the cpu. System Monitor show the cpu at 100% utilization It has the correct resolution and it appears to be doing 3D since the widows once they turn up have a bit of drop shadow around them. Is this machine actually using the poulsbo driver or did it not for some reason load it? This is a straight generic kernel downloaded yesterday. If it didn't load the Poulsbo driver how do I get it into the machine since the Proprietary Driver App appears to be missing off the System Settings Window.

Is it worth me actually doing anything with this or shall I 'BlendTech' this netbook (or worse, take it back to Vista)?

[mikewhatever]

Hi there,

regarding 12.10 and the GMA500 chipset, I take it that it's basically a 'don't bother situation'?

I just downloaded 12.10 and installed it on an Acer One A0751h. It installed perfectly and it does look sweet as long as I don't actually do anything with the computer. It is staggeringly slow, I mean 286 slow. It's running a tiny anemic 1.3ghz Atom with 2 GB of memory and the cpu is running flat out. when I look for a video card in the 'Details' app it's reported as 'Unknown'. The OS reports that there is no graphics card and so all the screen handling is being done by the cpu. System Monitor show the cpu at 100% utilization It has the correct resolution and it appears to be doing 3D since the widows once they turn up have a bit of drop shadow around them. Is this machine actually using the poulsbo driver or did it not for some reason load it? This is a straight generic kernel downloaded yesterday. If it didn't load the Poulsbo driver how do I get it into the machine since the Proprietary Driver App appears to be missing off the System Settings Window.

Is it worth me actually doing anything with this or shall I 'BlendTech' this netbook (or worse, take it back to Vista)?

You can check with lspci -nnk | grep -A3 VGA .
It probably does use the correct driver, which simply isn't capable of handling Unity. You can run Ubuntu 12.04 with Unity2d on that, or else Kubuntu(without effects), Xubuntu and Lubuntu.

[Karosieben]

Hello @ all,

i'm trying to install kubuntu 12.10 desktop i386 on my Dell Latitude ST (Intel Atom Z670)

The installation works fine, but after booting from the internal SSD there is no X-Server, only shell-Login.

My kernel is 3.5.0-17-generic i686

My modified options in /etc/default/grub are:

GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="quiet splash sdhci.debug_quirks=4"

Note: the sdhci option is needed for the Atheros WLAN/BT-Card. (Dell 1535C)

I tried all suggestions from the Wiki about the GMA 500 for ubuntu 12.04, nothing gets the gui working and the last one (915resolution) is getting my system stuck before loading grub.

Any ideas?

Regards,
Karosieben

[trewelu]

Hello,

I already got much help from here. Thanks for that. Once again I have a question:

I'm using Ubuntu 12.04 on a Sony Vaio Series X with a gma500 ofc. Now I'd like to use an external monitor. When I connect it and reboot, the image is set to 1024x768 on both montiors and the image is mirrored. Is there any change to switch the internal and external monitors to different resolutions and expand the desktop on both screen?

Which is the maximum resolution the gma500 is cappable of? My internal montior uses 1367x768.

Bye
MPW

Hi, I'm using vaio P in archlinux, so it might not 100% the same but this is what I did. I need to use modesetting driver instead of fbdev one (I don't know what is the default for ubuntu).

Then I query xrandr for supported external resolution and display name. (I don't attach it to any external monitor when I did this

[min@sakura xfce4-volumed]$ xrandr 
Screen 0: minimum 320 x 200, current 1600 x 768, maximum 2048 x 2048
LVDS-0 connected 1600x768+0+0 0mm x 0mm
   1600x768       30.0*+   59.9  
   1368x676       59.7  
   1280x614       59.7  
   1256x600       59.8  
S-video-0 disconnected
S-video-1 disconnected
VGA-0 disconnected

finally set the resolution

"xrandr --output LVDS-0 --mode 1600x768 --rate 59.9 --output VGA-0 --mode 1920x1080 --below LVDS-0"

As you can see the maximum resolution is 2048x2048, so you need to stack it top and bottom instead of left and right

[mpw]

Hello,

thanks for your answer, but xrandr just tells me:

mpw@MPWs-Netbook:~$ sudo xrandr
xrandr: Failed to get size of gamma for output default
Screen 0: minimum 1366 x 768, current 1366 x 768, maximum 1366 x 768
default connected 1366x768+0+0 0mm x 0mm
   1366x768        0.0*

[trewelu]

Do you have a Xorg configuration? You might want to check archlinux wiki for pulsbo/gma500. It has a section for dual monitor. I don't how much adjustment you will ned to make the step work on ubuntu.

Probably someone who is currently using ubuntu will be able to help you better.

[cataclop]

Hello,

Thanks to the forum Archlinux, I could have several things running, and had a real performance boost :
− I installed xserver-xorg-video-modesetting from this ppa ;
− I put that in /usr/share/X11/xorg.conf.d/00-modesetting.conf (create it if it doesn't exist) :

Section "Device"
    Identifier  "gma500_gfx"
    Driver      "modesetting"
    Option     "SWCursor"       "ON"
EndSection

− then I restarted X (disconnect/reconnect).

Doing that gave me the ability to :
− have 2 different screens thanks to xrandr (I installed grandr to have a gui) ;
− use icc color profiles thanks to argyllcms.

Please forgive me if I made English mistakes (I'm French) ; hope that will help.