Announcement

**GreyGeek** · Aug 11, 2009, 10:11 AM

Re: Intel GMA-500 will NOT be supported in Kubuntu 9.10 (Karmic).

Originally posted by lmilano

...
As noted in that article, it was Intel's decision, not Canonical's. For more info, see here (and the very many useful links in the article):

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?pag...item&px=NzQ0NA

So, if you have one of those, beware. And if you are planning to buy a netbook, stay away from that chipset. Note that GMA 950 is OK:

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?pag...item&px=NzAyOQ

Me, I vote with my wallet, and only by hardware that is supported by open source drivers.

[soapbox]
Making the code closed source helps whom? Need I ask?

Windows will come preinstalled on the DELL Mini-10 and other netbooks that have that chip. I wonder how much was paid to Intel to keep Linux out of the GMA500 market? With Linux approaching 12-15% of the USA desktop markets share, and even higher in China and other countries, it is like saying to 15% of your market that you don't want their business.

Who can afford to help Intel make up the loss of 15% of that market share? NVidia? ATI? Hardly. DELL? HP? Lenovo? Toshiba? With razor thin profit margins? Not likely Any guesses? Anyone? :P
[/soapbox]

**dibl** · Aug 11, 2009, 02:02 PM

Re: Intel GMA-500 will NOT be supported in Kubuntu 9.10 (Karmic).

There are lots of laptops, notebooks, and netbooks with nVidia GPUs. The GNU/Linux community should simply plan their purchases accordingly.

**lmilano** · Aug 11, 2009, 05:27 PM

Re: Intel GMA-500 will NOT be supported in Kubuntu 9.10 (Karmic).

Originally posted by dibl

There are lots of laptops, notebooks, and netbooks with nVidia GPUs. The GNU/Linux community should simply plan their purchases accordingly.

What? NVIDIA has never ever released an open source driver. Their binary driver sucks less than ATI's, but ATI is releasing specs of all of their hardware, and collaborating in the production of open source drivers. in the meantime, the ATI Catalyst (a royal PITA) get you going very well (when it works :P)

Go ask the Noveau folks, trying to reverse engineer Nvidia's stuff without ANY cooperation from Nvidia, what they think of them!

Intel has also had a wonderful policy of going open until this chipset. I hope they reconsider their decision. They are doing other wonderful work such as maintaining lots of the power saving stuff in Linux, such as acpi and more:
http://www.lesswatts.org/projects/

I don't want to sound inflammatory, but while I appreciate that Nvidia produces Linux drivers, binary drivers are not good enough, so I vote with my wallet (and yes, I used Nvidia , and yes, it did have troubles, an no, you can't fix things easily in a binary driver).

**dibl** · Aug 11, 2009, 05:56 PM

Re: Intel GMA-500 will NOT be supported in Kubuntu 9.10 (Karmic).

Sorry, I wasn't clear -- I didn't mean to suggest there is an open-source driver for nVidia GPUs. There is not (well, there is "nv", with no 3D ....).

However, my experience and my observation is, nVidia is the "least worst" choice for GPU. Why?

1. S3 Unichrome -- I don't think you'll find a positive post on this forum.
2. ATI -- kind of a mixed bag -- I almost gave up on Linux after spending days fighting fglrx and xorg.conf. You still see frequent stories of misery and frustration, with no good solution available for many models.
3. Intel -- well, nice of them to give the design information. Kinda-sorta worked reasonably up until the new X.org came out. Pretty much a basket case for the past 6 months, however. Doesn't appear to be getting much better, based on what I read above.

Meanwhile, I've had 3 years of totally satisfactory graphics performance in Linux, from the following nVidia GPUs:

- 7900GS
- 8800GTS
- 9600GT
- GTX260

So, closed-source or not, the nVidia folks are putting forth serious effort to support Linux. I'll take that over the other stuff, open or not.

**GreyGeek** · Aug 11, 2009, 06:42 PM

Re: Intel GMA-500 will NOT be supported in Kubuntu 9.10 (Karmic).

Dibl, you pretty much took my paper right out from underneath my pen!

The big problem with NVIDIA isn't its binary support for Linux, which does (or used to) work pretty well on the NVIDIA cards I've owned in the past. It is NVIDIA's problem with their video chips burning out in record numbers. Almost all of the 7XX and 8XX series chips have reported HIGH return rates, in some cases up to 70%. HP and some of the other OEMs are suing NVIDIA for over a BILLION in returns and repairs costs. But, if you get a good one, it works fairly well.

Intel, up to this GMA500 fiaso, was doing very good on Linux community relations. BUT, their technical support is somewhat lagging. While they did release the source code for a Linux driver for the GM45 chip series, it wasn't complete or well documented, so the GM45 would work under Linux in some laptops and not others. And, the Itel driver would work under some distros and not others. For example, this Sony VAIO VGN-FW140E/H laptop features the Itel Mobil Series 4 Chipset (GM45). Under Mandriva's xorg Intel driver I could NOT get a 3D accelerated video screen. I reported the bug given by the EDID code on my video driver to the xorg bugzilla last October and followed the bug through to the discovery of a fix in the middle of last Feburary. It was at that exact same time that I saw that Kubuntu 9.04 was featuring KDE 4.2.4. Since Mandriva had only KDE 4.2.1 and wouldn't go to 4.2.4 until June, I decided to give Kubuntu Jaunty's LiveCD a try. I was STUNNED to see it come up with 3D accelerated video in the LiveCD mode! I had burned the ISO before the xorg bug I reported was patched, so Jaunty couldn't be benefiting from the patch. The difference was in how HAL, under each distro, detected the video chip and assigned a driver. Mandriva's detection resulted in the i810 driver being assigned. That was the one that was being worked on at the xorg bugzilla. Kubuntu assigned the i915 driver, which made all the difference in the world.

**lmilano** · Aug 11, 2009, 07:04 PM

Re: Intel GMA-500 will NOT be supported in Kubuntu 9.10 (Karmic).

But, so you see, GreyGeek, how much more resources you have if the driver is Open Source? In the meantime, Marek_online is stuck with no graphics (while trying to fix something else) because the nvidia binary driver is not loading in karmic:

http://kubuntuforums.net/forums/inde...2147#msg192147

Oh well, let keep an eye on the GMA 500 issue and report here if there are any news ...

**GreyGeek** · Aug 12, 2009, 06:54 AM

Re: Intel GMA-500 will NOT be supported in Kubuntu 9.10 (Karmic).

Originally posted by lmilano

But, so you see, GreyGeek, how much more resources you have if the driver is Open Source?

Of course, which was the topic of my "rant".

http://www.answers.com/topic/intel-gma#GMA_500

GMA 500
(under Linux)
There is no sufficient driver support for the GMA 500. The driver wasn't developed in-house and will not work with kernels newer than 2.6.24. Newer distributions like Ubuntu 8.10 with a newer kernel will not work properly.[66][67]

......

The Intel System Controller Hub US15W for the Atom processor Z5xx series features a GMA 500 graphic system. Rather than being developed in-house, this core is a PowerVR SGX core licensed from Imagination Technologies.[22] Since PowerVR is not cooperative with the open source movement, this has resulted in the reliance of out dated closed source Linux drivers.[23]

(under Windows)
Intel describes this as "a flexible, programmable architecture that supports shader-based technology, 2D, 3D and advanced 3D graphics, high-definition video decode, and image processing. Features include screen tiling, internal true color processing, zero overhead anti-aliasing, programmable shader 3D accelerator, and 32-bit floating-point operations."[24]

MSI's Wind U115 Hybrid, Sony's VAIO P series, Fujitsu's Lifebook U820, Dell's Inspiron Mini 10 and Inspiron Mini 12, and Acer's Aspire One 751[25] are some of the rare examples of using the GMA 500 US15W.

So, Intel blames PowerVR, BUT, Intel chose PowerVR as its GMA500 driver. Astute readers will take caution NOT to purchase the Dell Mini 10 or 12, the Acer Aspire One 751, and other "rare examples" of mini's that use the GMA500.

Astute readers will also recognize that MSI usually uses FoxConn's mobo BIOS, which has been demonstrated to deliberately send Linux off into a defective vector address during bootup. That was proven when it was demonstrated that if the Linux vectors were replaced by the Windows vectors then Linux ran very well on the BIOS. The Microsoft connection evidence was overwhelming. When faced with the evidence FoxConn said, in essence, "buzz off".

Word or warning to Linux users: BECAREFUL of mobo's which feature the FoxConn BIOS.

I appreciate http://intellinuxgraphics.org/, since ONLY Intel has been releasing video driver code as open source for drivers other than the GMA500, and I believe they will continue to do so.

Oh well, let keep an eye on the GMA 500 issue and report here if there are any news ...

The FOSS "Project VGA" is dead.

The "Open Graphics Project" is NOT dead: http://wiki.opengraphics.org/tiki-index.php, but they have a LONG way to go:

Announcements and News
21 April 2009 Announcement: VGA emulation is working! As part of a complete graphics solution, we need to support VGA text mode. This way, OGD1 can be plugged into an x86 PC and used as the boot console. Today, we achieved that.

So, if you want to run a box (not laptop) server with console mode only your are only $750 away!
No laptop chip is announced. While the OGP may be a boon to server admins who use ONLY the console, it will offer no hope for desktop and laptop SOHO users, to say nothing of Joe and Sally Sixpack.

It is possible that some group may attempt to reverse engineer the GMA500 video driver BUT due to the patent fiaso created by the USTPO, it is probably too dangerous, financially, to go there.

**lmilano** · Aug 12, 2009, 07:35 AM

Re: Intel GMA-500 will NOT be supported in Kubuntu 9.10 (Karmic).

Excellent info, GreyGeek!

Originally posted by GreyGeek

http://www.answers.com/topic/intel-gma#GMA_500

GMA 500

The Intel System Controller Hub US15W for the Atom processor Z5xx series features a GMA 500 graphic system. Rather than being developed in-house, this core is a PowerVR SGX core licensed from Imagination Technologies.[22] Since PowerVR is not cooperative with the open source movement, this has resulted in the reliance of out dated closed source Linux drivers.[23]

So, Intel blames PowerVR, BUT, Intel chose PowerVR as its GMA500 driver. Astute readers will take caution NOT to purchase the Dell Mini 10 or 12, the Acer Aspire One 751, and other "rare examples" of mini's that use the GMA500.

Just a clarification, because of cross-patent agreements, NDA's and other legal beauties, once Intel decides to buy the hardware from PowerVR, they can't open source their own driver. The mistake was to get the chipset core from them in the first place, IMO.

Another clarification, this is an issue with the Mini 10, but not with the Mini 10v, which uses Intel 950:
http://configure.us.dell.com/dellsto...op-inspiron-10

I just added in my original post a link to a nice comparison chart in Wikipedia
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_netbooks

Astute readers will also recognize that MSI usually uses FoxConn's mobo BIOS, which has been demonstrated to deliberately send Linux off into a defective vector address during bootup. That was proven when it was demonstrated that if the Linux vectors were replaced by the Windows vectors then Linux ran very well on the BIOS. The Microsoft connection evidence was overwhelming. When faced with the evidence FoxConn said, in essence, "buzz off".

Word or warning to Linux users: BECAREFUL of mobo's which feature the FoxConn BIOS.

Crap, how did I NOT know this. Do you have a link?

I bought a Foxconn Mobo for my current build. CPU scaling doesn't work, due to a bug in their BIOS, and I spent two months in a lenghty, pointless online support conversation with them, where it was clear they were just trying to get me tired, and not to actually fix it:
https://bugs.launchpad.net/acpi/+bug/363868

**GreyGeek** · Aug 12, 2009, 07:58 AM

Re: Intel GMA-500 will NOT be supported in Kubuntu 9.10 (Karmic).

Originally posted by lmilano

....

Astute readers will also recognize that MSI usually uses FoxConn's mobo BIOS, which has been demonstrated to deliberately send Linux off into a defective vector address during bootup. That was proven when it was demonstrated that if the Linux vectors were replaced by the Windows vectors then Linux ran very well on the BIOS. The Microsoft connection evidence was overwhelming. When faced with the evidence FoxConn said, in essence, "buzz off".

Word or warning to Linux users: BECAREFUL of mobo's which feature the FoxConn BIOS.

Crap, how did I NOT know this. Do you have a link?

....

http://ubuntu-virginia.ubuntuforums....d.php?t=869249

He shows the evidence and then gives you the link to tools to disassemble and check the FoxConn BIOS you have. Good luck!

**lmilano** · Aug 12, 2009, 08:25 AM

Re: Intel GMA-500 will NOT be supported in Kubuntu 9.10 (Karmic).

Originally posted by GreyGeek

Originally posted by lmilano

....

Astute readers will also recognize that MSI usually uses FoxConn's mobo BIOS, which has been demonstrated to deliberately send Linux off into a defective vector address during bootup. That was proven when it was demonstrated that if the Linux vectors were replaced by the Windows vectors then Linux ran very well on the BIOS. The Microsoft connection evidence was overwhelming. When faced with the evidence FoxConn said, in essence, "buzz off".

Word or warning to Linux users: BECAREFUL of mobo's which feature the FoxConn BIOS.

Crap, how did I NOT know this. Do you have a link?

....

http://ubuntu-virginia.ubuntuforums....d.php?t=869249

He shows the evidence and then gives you the link to tools to disassemble and check the FoxConn BIOS you have. Good luck!

AMAZING! That is exactly what they did to me, basically pretend that they were trying to help. Thank you so much, you made my day. Just to think that I could have gotten an Asus mobo for just 10 more greenbacks. I already burned the difference (and more) in buying a cheap sound card, because the onboard sound had horrible static noise.

I won't probably do the fix (too much risk), but I will join that forum thread, and strongly complain to Foxconn this time.

Thank you!

**Guest** · Oct 08, 2009, 04:53 PM

Re: Intel GMA-500 will NOT be supported in Kubuntu 9.10 (Karmic).

Hi all, sorry to restart this thread but I didn't want to start another one.

I have a big question:

Can anyone say if Karmic will at least run at full resolution on a Dell Mini 12?

Honestly as long as it does that I can live without speedy screen movement. I bought my 12 before anyone seemed to realise that the GMA500 wouldn't work, thinking something like "oh, Intel gpu, no problem!" Sadly I've been stuck with XP ever since. Luckily though, I couldn't care less about desktop effects and if I want to play games (rare) I have an adequate desktop I can switch to, but I'm finding XP so limiting in other ways. (memory ceiling, slow KDE updates, favourite software unavailable, keeps "waking up when closed" and draining the battery in my briefcase, and otherwise just plain irritating)

I didn't buy a netbook for graphics performance (obviously?), but I just want to use things like Semantik, Krita, Amarok and LMMS again.

By the way, my last computer had a Via Chrome GPU, so please humour me. I'm having a bad few computing years.

**lmilano** · Oct 08, 2009, 05:32 PM

Re: Intel GMA-500 will NOT be supported in Kubuntu 9.10 (Karmic).

Jonny, I think it won't fly, sorry! (you can always try a live CD though, it takes a minute). However, there is hope Dell/Intel will do something about it in the future. In the meantime, I think this is your best bet:

http://mydellmini.com/forum/dell-min...mini-12-a.html

But please read caregully, it will _FORMAT_YOUR_WHOLE_DISK_

What a mess! As I said in the OP, Intel has been doing wonderful things for Linux, but this was a huge mistake. I recommend you send a complain to both Dell and Intel. Only if we complain we'll get heard.

**Guest** · Oct 13, 2009, 11:10 PM

Re: Intel GMA-500 will NOT be supported in Kubuntu 9.10 (Karmic).

lmilano,

Thanks so much for your reply, I understand the situation.

Luckily I have just read that the new version of Mandriva will include the driver, so I'm going to give that a shot.

http://wiki.mandriva.com/en/2010.0_RC_2#Poulsbo_drivers

I do like Kubuntu, but I'll just be happy if I can finally ditch XP. Mandriva is a pretty good KDE distro too.

Thanks again.

**lmilano** · Oct 14, 2009, 04:16 AM

Re: Intel GMA-500 will NOT be supported in Kubuntu 9.10 (Karmic).

Oh yes, Mandrake/Mandriva has been my distro before Kubuntu, for about 2 to 3 years. Very nice!

Good thing you can ditch it! I have to use it at work, and it hurts!

Cheers!
Leo

Announcement

Intel GMA-500 will NOT be supported in Kubuntu 9.10 (Karmic).

Intel GMA-500 will NOT be supported in Kubuntu 9.10 (Karmic).

Comment

Comment

Comment

Comment

Comment

Comment

Comment

Comment

Comment

Comment

Comment

Comment

Comment

Comment