[Debian-eeepc-devel] Squeeze release goals

[Ben Armstrong]

On Sun, 11 Oct 2009 16:34:49 +0300
jh at tutpro.com (Juha Heinanen) wrote:
> 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.

I agree.  This is hardly what I'd call 'support'.  But unfortunately,
we seem to be at the mercy of Intel.  I was talking on irc to #debian-x
and it was suggested there that we should complain to Intel about the
state of free drivers for GMA500.  In the past, they've been very
supportive and provided free drivers to the point where Intel became
the recommended "just works" option.  With GMA500, there has been a
turnaround.  I think they need to know we are unhappy.

A slight change of topic ... I have nudged people here before about
updating our wiki with 1101HA details.  Now I have provided this stub:

http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEeePC/Model/1101HA

I linked the stub here, but have not added it to the model table (which
is slightly tricky to do, as you need to span cells vertically and
preserve the alignment to make it easy for editors to see which
values belong to which columns -- please edit with care).

http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEeePC/Models

Would you and other 1101HA owners please flesh it out a bit with
whatever you have found out so far about Debian on this model?

Thanks,
Ben