Installing on the Dell Mini 12

[fitzkarraldo]

I uninstalled the poulsbo 3D driver but buntu still freezes every hour or so. I'm presuming that when I did a apt-get upgrade recently that it also installed a newer poulsbo 2D driver as the one I have installed now refuses to work with the previous - 2.6.28-11 - kernel.

Have you removed both xpsb-glx and psb-firmware packages?

[PreviousN]

I've currently got poulsbo/GMA500 drivers installed in Jaunty. I was getting random freezes (and 3d didn't work well anyway), so I removed the 3d part of the driver. I am getting fewer freezes but its still unusable.

So to recap: I've got Jaunty, latest kernel, and 2d drivers installed. I would give you more information but I'm so frustrated I don't even want to turn the damn thing on!

But here's my question. I'm willing to run an old version of ubuntu. I mean, I ran it the first time around on a different computer without problems. So, my question is: do you get random freezes when installing hardy LTS and then putting psb drivers in it? If so, there is no point.

Another irritation: even when the damn thing isn't freezing, if I close the lid I can't get video back after the backlite shuts off. Frustrating!

[satbunny]

Have you removed both xpsb-glx and psb-firmware packages?

Yup..

and I dual boot jaunty and hardy, and both freeze a little without the drivers, and freeze a lot with them..

[fibrewire]

hey in vista i noticed on a reinstall of the driver on my AO751h that there is some sort of PersistenceThread.exe that runs in task manager. i wonder if this is needed to restart the driver on crash, which has happened several times in vista

[gtaluvit]

For those of you with the 2D only freeze, this works for me:

Press the power button or insert/remove a USB device. For some reason that triggers it to "wake up" from its frozen state. I have to cancel the shutdown dialog but it's better than a hard restart. I've also noticed I get less freezes if I disable the touchpad and just use an external mouse.

[satbunny]

Thanks for the tip, although we're getting quite junkyard mechanics with the Mini 12, aren't we?

[nobodyisme]

I was searching for info on poulsbo and found this. Maybe it can be useful, these packages where published on 2009-07-25. Can anybody say if these packages are of any help?

[dragonmule]

Hey guys, I have two dell mini 12 to check, 1.33 and 1.6. Some have said that the freezing is only with 1.6 which is incorrect as I've seen it happen with 1.33. I have noticed it more common with the 1.6ghz, but maybe that is just my bad luck.

In any case, I have found that my machine does not freeze if I set the cpu frequency applet to set to performance, power saving, etc. This also has an automatic setting which is the default behavior.

I have also noticed that with the most updated (Apr 9) dell-mini canonical upgrades for 8.04, the crashes are far less frequent, but not eliminated with the speedstep frequency set to auto. Still, with clock freq set on the CPU, I haven't seen one freeze (*crosses fingers*).

I haven't seen any update on the video driver in quite some time.

I've checked with
cat /var/log/dpkg.log |grep psb

And these are all the Mar 1 version afaik.

I expect the updates to continue, but reading these threads it seems as if people are trying to do all sorts of things to install different packages and versions hoping some magic will unlock the full potential of the gma500 on linux. I don't think this is currently possible.

As for general progress with the VA API, there are people working on it.

http://cgit.freedesktop.org/libva/

People have been putting in work regularly on this. libva is supposed to be the next step in linux video... but the only video chips which natively support libva are the GMA500 and S3 Chrome from what I understand. This creates a bit of a problem as both of these are closed source.

Where are people seeing crashes btw? For me, it seems to only be when flash in firefox is running which is often. I thought it was networking at first as I wasn't reproducing a crash with the network off, but now I am thinking it is when the cpu frequency changes in the middle of a flash animation running.

I tried to upgrade my 1.6 machine to 9.04 almost immediately, but quickly went back to the restore disk and the updates when the video playback seemed to not work as well. I suppose I did something wrong. I am going to try to move to 9.10 in a couple of months and see how that goes.

If all of this has been said or if I am incorrect on some things, sorry.

[dragonmule]

I was searching for info on poulsbo and found this. Maybe it can be useful, these packages where published on 2009-07-25. Can anybody say if these packages are of any help?

This may work? But it is not current

libva (0.29-9-0ubuntu6netbook2)That is not latest version of libva at least. I think 0.30.4 is.

[PreviousN]

I am no longer getting freezes, following sammyboy405's advice from this thread: http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1213416

Do this, Unless you Really want the 3D Features.

Keep the 3D Drivers..

Here is a Copy of my xorg.conf

Code:

Section "Monitor"
        Identifier      "Configured Monitor"
EndSection

Section "Screen"
        Identifier      "Default Screen"
        Monitor         "Configured Monitor"
        Device          "Configured Video Device"
EndSection

Section "Device"
        Identifier      "Configured Video Device"
        Option "AccelMethod" "EXA"
        Option "DRI" "off"
        Option "MigrationHeuristic" "greedy"
EndSection

Section "ServerFlags"
        Option  "DontZap"       "False"
EndSection

I added the

Code:

Option "AccelMethod" "EXA"
Option "DRI" "off"
Option "MigrationHeuristic" "greedy"

And the freezes "So Far" have gone away and I still have the performance increase.

I ran glxgears for about 5 hours and no problems on my SC3 (which also has GMA500/Poulsbo). Then I surfed the net on it for a while and still no problems.

I, however, am still not able to have the display "wake" after being closed. I always have to turn off the computer via the power button if I forget and close the lid.