| Ubuntu 9.04 on the Aspire One 751 |
 |
 |
 |
| Écrit par JLangbridge | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Jeudi, 11 Juin 2009 14:44 | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Ubuntu 9.04 on the Aspire One 751 This morning, I received an Acer Aspire One 751. It is a new machine, a logical continuation of the Aspire One series. The original AOA110 had an 8.9" screen, the D150 had a 10" screen, and this baby has a 12" screen. That isn't the only difference. Netbooks have been around for a while, but have been big business for a year. Before, we had ultraportables; "real" machines with processing power that were light enough to fit into a suitcase, folder, whatever. Personally, I had a Toshiba Portégé 2000 that worked very, very well. It's downside was the graphics; you weren't going to play any games on this machine, but with an external battery, I could last 8 hours. That's an international flight's worth of computing. It was solid, stable, and looked great. It had only what was needed; a Pentium M for processing power, no CD/DVD drive, and just enough RAM/HDD to do basics. It worked great as a lightweight dev station. Eventually it died, and ever since I've been looking for something to replace it. The Aspire One series was a possibility, but they did have a drawback. The first generation of netbooks were light and followed on the "Just enough" philosophy, but most ended up looking like a toy, or a "learning computer" you buy for your kids. The 751 is different. The 751 looks and feels professional. I fel in love with its sleek design and its solid, professional feel. This article is, as always, a work in progress. It is comprised of 2 parts. The quick version, and the long version. It is about installing Ubuntu 9.04 onto the Aspire One 751, and could probably be extended to any distribution. Quick versionDon't. Long versionThis machine comes preinstalled with Windows XP. Even if you don't like Windows, fire it up just to get a look at the screen. It's a beauty. You'd better look quick in Windows, because you aren't going to be seeing the same with Linux, believe me. The screen resolution is 1366x768, boasting HD capacity. The processor is an Intel Atom Z520, equipped with 1Gb of RAM and 160Gb of hard disk. It is, in theory, enough to watch a few videos and get on the road with. Boot into LinuxTypical of any machine nowadays, press F12 on the BIOS screen, and boot up from a USB key. I got hold of an Ubuntu 9.04 Desktop (i386) and flashed it to a USB key via unetbootin. Nothing out of the ordinary here. First impressionsThe resolution is wrong on startup, the screen is detected at 1024x768, and is painfully slow. I figured that this was because of a missing driver or something, and I carried on. Everything else was great; the hard drive was detected and I partitioned it, Wifi works out of the box, and there isn't much else to say. I formatted the entire drive, 158Gb for Linux and the rest as a swap partition. I won't go into detail about the install, because there isn't anything to say. Just install, and at the end, reboot. ... then things go wrongOn first boot, the screen resolution was still at 1024x768. xrandr couldn't detect any other resolution, which got me a bit worried. I was expecting to be able to boot straight into native resolution, but I'm used to first boot surprises, so I carried on. I figured a new kernel would add some modules or something, or maybe even a proprietary driver. apt-get update, apt-get upgrade and reboot. Now my system was up to date, but I was still in 1024x768. I launched the Ubuntu hardware drivers applet, and lo and behold, proprietary drives for download! Wait... This was for the wifi card only, and that worked fine. No video drivers. Damn. I was curious, so I did what I should have done right from the start. I opened up a terminal, and ran lspci. Then things really went downhill. This is what I got: 00:00.0 Host bridge: Intel Corporation System Controller Hub (SCH Poulsbo) (rev 07) 00:02.0 VGA compatible controller: Intel Corporation System Controller Hub (SCH Poulsbo) Graphics Controller (rev 07) Uhoh... Poulsbo. This isn't good news. I've heard a lot about this chipset, and it was even cited on Slashdot once or twice. If this had been any other machine, I'd have given in immediately, but this machine was just too good looking to give in like that. That and the fact that my boss is in love with it too and wants it up and running ASAP. So I began to dig about on Google, taking half a days work with me. The GMA500 chipset (aka: Poulsbo) is also used on other systems, notable the Dell Mini 10 and Mini 12, that come preinstalled with Ubuntu, so something, somewhere, just has to work. The Ubuntu-mobile project on Launchpad are already working on a solution, and they propose a repository with the necessary files. Don't get too excited. Add the following to /etc/apt/sources.list : deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/ubuntu-mobile/ppa/ubuntu jaunty main Refresh your apt cache by running sudo apt-update then sudo apt-get install xserver-xorg-video-psb. Reboot your machine, and voilà! 1366x768. Now what?Touchmods has the same machine as I do, and also has the same problems (read his article here). He tried a different approach in the beginning, but ended up with the same frustration. I decided to dig a little deeper, and came up with some surprises.
Update: The launchpad repository has been updated as of monday 29/06/09, and now proposes a new set of files; including a 2D driver and a 3D driver. Installing these doesn't do anything speed wise, but it does install the firmware and correctly places it in the right folder, and dmesg stops complaining.
3.26 Copyright (C) 2008 Compojoom.com / Copyright (C) 2007 Alain Georgette / Copyright (C) 2006 Frantisek Hliva. All rights reserved." |
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Mis à jour ( Mardi, 11 Août 2009 10:14 ) | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
?