When I was choosing my netbook, I knew that I will install Linux on it, so, I put attention on its hardware.
Having noticed that it has an Intel videocard, I though that it’s perfectly supported by xf86-video-intel driver. Au contraire! The netbook had an Intel Graphics Media Accelerator 3600 without native Linux drivers. So, I used VESA driver on Gentoo (oops!).
People, be extremely careful when you choose hardware. Remember that even a good vendor can have badly supported series.
Anyway, distros like Ubuntu and Fedora chosen xf86-video-modesetting driver with quite satisfying video quality. My experimental Chromium OS had no xf86-video-modesetting driver, therefore it used VESA with its pale colors. It’s not a big deal to build the driver manually.
First, we get Chromium OS source code. Second, we enter chromium chroot environment on the development notebook.
alessio@toshiba ~/chromiumos $ ./chromite/bin/cros_sdk Password: (cr) ((0d65d49...)) alessio@toshiba ~/trunk/src/scripts $
Now we use emerge-${BOARD}
command, where BOARD
can be x86-generic
, amd64-generic
, etc. depending on target platform.
(cr) ((0d65d49...)) alessio@toshiba ~/trunk/src/scripts $ emerge-x86-generic -a x11-drivers/xf86-video-modesetting These are the packages that would be merged, in order: Calculating dependencies... done! [ebuild N ] x11-drivers/xf86-video-modesetting-0.5.0 to /build/x86-generic/ Would you like to merge these packages? [Yes/No]
When the package is built, we copy /build/x86-generic/packages/x11-drivers/xf86-video-modesetting-0.5.0.tbz2
tarball to the netbook and unpack it to /
.
For some reason, Xorg server on Chromium OS doesn’t choose modesetting driver automatically. Let’s specify it explicitly in /etc/X11/xorg.conf
:
Section "Device" Identifier "DefaultDevice" Option "monitor-LVDS1" "DefaultMonitor" Driver "modesetting" EndSection
Reboot and enjoy!
Hi ! Can you publish your package for download ? 🙂
Hi! Here is it: https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/73662103/xf86-video-modesetting-0.5.0.tbz2