[Debian-eeepc-devel] Squeeze release goals

[Juha Heinanen]

Pedro Bulach Gapski writes:

 > I have been running squeeze on the ao751h (not an eeepc, but holds a
 > GMA500), and I believe this can be done with some installer black
 > magic:

Pedro,

 >  1. latest grub2 from sid includes 915resolution patch for the GMA500.
 > With this approach we can work at full screen resolution (1366x768 in
 > my case), as long as grub-pc is used;

I don't why, but grub2 is not able to dual boot to windows on my 1101HA.
Grub2 just spits an error message 'cannot get C/H/S values'.  Dual boot
used to work with legacy grub.  This is not a major issue, however,
because I can live fine without windows.

 >  2. configure a kernel framebuffer with uvesa  (BTW, this gives a
 > *beautiful* console);

Any hints on how to configure that?

 >  3. drive X with fbdev.

Same question.

 > I believe this is approach is feasible for squeeze and it would solve
 > a lot of GMA500 problems, and does not involve anything but installer
 > black magic.

I have two problems that I have with Grub2+vesa+GMA500 solution:

- Performance.  glxgears gives about 200 fps, which is quite low for
  video and things like googlemaps.

- No backlight control.  If I want to adjust backlight, I need to do it
  during bios setup.  Also, screen banking does not work using normal
  screen saver.  I have to use 'vbetool dpms on/off' for that,

These are not show stopper issues, but surely I would like to be able to
utilize all capabilities of the graphics chipset.

-- juha