Comments on: HOWTO: Compiling Intel Atom Poulsbo GMA 500 graphics driver on Debian

By: anthony

anthony — Wed, 03 Mar 2010 22:55:50 +0000

hi,

this looks great, i really want to be able to code on the move with my vaio p.

I’m willing to go with debian, but i thought i should ask, can this method be adapted to some other common distros? fedora 8,9,10?

i can guess at reasons why not, but i’m not that much a of a linux buff.

thanks for any constructive replies.

By: Allan

Allan — Sat, 27 Feb 2010 19:08:48 +0000

First off, thank you for all your hard work. I’m running Gentoo, and can’t get the psb driver to work. I have everything installed, kernel mod loads and works, your xorg, etc. The moment that I try to start X I get a blank screen, X just hangs when it loads the psb driver. Only way to get into the system at that point is to ssh in. Half the time it just totally locks the system up and not even ssh is possible. Some system info:

System: VGN-P788K (2gb ram, 64gb ssd)
Kernel: 2.6.32 (Tux on Ice)

Gentoo packages and revisions:
Xorg-x11: 7.4-r1
Xorg-Server: 1.7.5
psb-kmod: 4.41.1_p10-r1
psb-firmware: 0.30_p3
xf86-video-psb: 0.32.0_p1

As long as I don’t ‘force’ X to use the psb driver, it will load and run fine ‘autoselecting’ the mesa driver…. Any suggestions?

Thank you!

By: RaptorBlue

RaptorBlue — Sat, 27 Feb 2010 00:49:27 +0000

Hi Admin,

thanks for the work you have done.

Nevertheless i experienced a problem with the xorg driver.
During the boot process the display is changed to high resolution (when loading the psb kernel module).
But the xserver does not start anymore (your xorg.conf). The error log says: dlopen: dlopen: /usr/lib/xorg/modules/drivers/psb_drv.so: undefined symbol: resVgaShared

Any ideas on this?

Thx
Raptor

By: RaptorBlue

RaptorBlue — Sat, 27 Feb 2010 00:38:43 +0000

Hi Aster,

do not copy the file drm_sysfs.c from the .tar file as described. As it seems the newer version is already patched.

Good Luck!

Raptor

P.S. Please let me know when you have working packages.

By: Aster

Aster — Wed, 24 Feb 2010 19:53:17 +0000

Hi there!
I’m trying to switch my new eeepc 1201ha featuring gma500 to linux and this guide seems to be my only hope.
I installed a Debian Squeeze and tried to follow these steps, but the first debuild you wrote comes with a fatal error at line 1330:
applying patch use_udev to ./ … failed.
Do you have any idea?

By: Admin

Admin — Mon, 15 Feb 2010 18:16:16 +0000

John,

These instructions should work on Debian Stable except for the fact that you will need to install the dkms package manually from Debian Testing since DKMS is not a part of current Debian Stable Release.

By: Admin

Admin — Mon, 15 Feb 2010 18:11:13 +0000

Yes, you need to install DKMS package from Debian Testing if you are using Debian Stable. That’s what I ended up doing too. The only drawback in Debian Stable is that you cannot get 3D acceleration working on Stable. I have posted the .config file also now.

By: Stillseeking

Stillseeking — Fri, 12 Feb 2010 06:36:33 +0000

John…
You’re right…I’m on a pure stable Lenny and I HAD to install the dkms from backport, no way without this. I then have successfully compiled psb.

Dear Admin, thanks a lot for the whole damn work you’ve done here !
Could you post here an ikconfig file from the Lenny kernel you used please ?

Thanks again for this nice usefull blog.

By: Stillseeking

Stillseeking — Wed, 10 Feb 2010 23:38:19 +0000

Hmm, on this page…
http://blogs.koolwal.net/2009/07/25/info-state-of-intel-poulsbo-chipset-graphics-driver/
He said…
“I took the pointers provided by these people and was able to compile and install the Poulsbo’s XOrg driver (psb.ko) and framebuffer driver (psbfb) on my Debian Stable (Lenny system)”
I have Lenny too, but I’m stuck with “DKMS isn’t installed” so I should have forgotten something, but if he got his working then we should too !

By: John

John — Wed, 03 Feb 2010 00:30:47 +0000

Will these instructions work on Debian stable (lenny), or is there something here that requires testing/unstable?

By: Admin

Admin — Wed, 20 Jan 2010 18:45:13 +0000

Thanks for your input. I have added your info.

By: KatolaZ

KatolaZ — Sun, 10 Jan 2010 13:20:31 +0000

Thanks a lot! You’ve made a really nice work. By reading your HOWTO (and, I should admit, by installing the precompiled packages provided by you, without recompiling them from source ), I was able to use that damn-crazy Poulsbo driver with Debian Squeeze on my ASUS 1101HA.

It’s a pity that this driver is not going to be included in the official Debian repos (mainly because of binary blobs and file overwriting….). And it’s even worse that we would probably never have any free driver for this chip-shit.

By: Yusuke

Yusuke — Thu, 07 Jan 2010 14:11:28 +0000

Hy guys
I got a Acer O751H and i have this cursed GMA 500, but 1 thing odd is the touchpad ‘tap to click’ not working on kde4, but it works under tty’s after installed gpm package, im running debian Squeeze on this netbook. Any clues on how to make it work in kde4 the tap to click?
thx in advance

By: shamann

shamann — Thu, 31 Dec 2009 23:40:34 +0000

Thanks!!! you are my new god…..

I’m now enjoying my new resolution. Great HowTo, thanks a lot

By: Jon_J

Jon_J — Sat, 19 Dec 2009 22:24:20 +0000

I’m glad to finally have Debian Squeeze on my Dell Mini-10 using its default resolution! Thank you so much!
I didn’t compile anything, I just used the files linked.
I came across one stumbling block, and repeated the procedure over 3 times. I found an omission that prevented me getting this installed using the collection of files.

At the command above:
# dpkg -i –force-overwrite libdrm-poulsbo*.deb
I changed it to the following and finally got the firmware installed:
# dpkg -i –force-overwrite libdrm-poulsbo*.deb psb-firmware_0.30-1squeeze1_all.deb