Steve's blog

I wrote a while back about the "fun" Jo and I were having with her Acer Aspire One 751 netbook, a machine that was "blessed" with Intel's integrated GMA500 graphics. It was a PITA to set the machine up and the final installation of Ubuntu Jaunty was anything but reliable, locking up frequently.

Well, there's more to the story. In the comments on that blog entry, Ben Armstrong pointed me at some very useful information from the Debian EeePC team: http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEeePC/Model/1101HA, specifically notes on how to use grub2 and the fbdev X driver to get native resolution on a 1366x768 screen. A couple of weeks back I finally managed to steal the laptop from Jo for a few minutes and try that setup. The results are very promising - X performance is perfectly acceptable and the X lockups have totally gone away. So (shock!) it looks like the crappy binary drivers were to blame.

Jo is over the moon that finally her Linux laptop is happy and she has specifically asked me to blog again and thank Ben for his help. Thanks! I'm also hoping that this post will help other people searching for useful information on this nasty hardware and how to make it work as well as possible.