Comments on: News from the Poulsbo front

By: mangoo

mangoo — Sat, 16 May 2009 21:49:07 +0000

I just received my Dell Mini 12 lately.

However, I’m not able to get resolutions bigger than 1024×768 (native is 1280×800), when I tried to install the latest pre-release of Fedora 11 (which contains vesa 2.2.0 driver).

xrandr for Ubuntu that comes with mini 12 shows resolutions: 1280×800, 1280×768, 1024×768, 800×600, 640×480.

Fedora only shows 1024×768, 800×600, 640×480.

Any special trick I’m not aware of?

By: mangoo

mangoo — Tue, 21 Apr 2009 20:38:56 +0000

Oh well.
I ordered Mini 12.

Let’s see if it’s as bad as they write

By: adamw

adamw — Mon, 20 Apr 2009 15:03:08 +0000

ah. sold without windows is tougher. No others spring to mind in the same price range, I’m afraid. You could get one off eBay, then the tax has been paid already anyway…

By: mangoo

mangoo — Mon, 20 Apr 2009 09:29:40 +0000

What other 12 inch laptops/netbooks are there?

Dell’s mini 12 aside, I only found Samsung nc20, which is only sold with Windows.
And certainly, I’m not going to pay this tax.

By: adamw

adamw — Mon, 13 Apr 2009 14:53:10 +0000

If you can find a system you’d like equally which doesn’t use the Poulsbo chipset, I’d really really recommend going with that. There are other cheap 12″ net/notebooks around.

If you really really want to go with the Mini 12, then using 8.04 (with the tips from that forum thread to get the NBR driver installed and working) is workable, but a bit of a pain, and will become increasingly painful as 8.04 becomes less cutting edge. Intel developers *are* working to get a usable general-purpose driver made available, but I don’t yet know what the likely timeframe is on that. Last I was able to divine from the discussions on various mailing lists, they’re currently attempting to come up with a fairly simple, entirely 2D driver to circumvent the problem with more advanced features relying on closed source code.

By: kevinbrighton

kevinbrighton — Sun, 12 Apr 2009 19:16:27 +0000

I was moments away from ordering a Mini 12 before reading this blog on the chipset issues. Do you think it’s work getting one and staying with Ubuntu 8.04 until the drivers are sorted out, or holding off in case it never is?
I used to use Linux all the time about 10 years ago, so I’m not so much new to it all, just out of touch.

By: adamw

adamw — Thu, 26 Mar 2009 03:16:32 +0000

Oh, right, yeah. I tend to do things the ‘proper’ happy-clappy clicky way – I suspend via gnome-power-manager (usually just by closing the lid, which I have set to suspend the system automatically).

I think some patches just went into the Rawhide kernel that might do something for the brightness.

By: pabr

pabr — Thu, 26 Mar 2009 00:35:34 +0000

OK, backlight works when I use /usr/sbin/pm-suspend… I hadn’t realized that ACPI had become so quirky over the years and that “echo mem > /sys/power/state” didn’t cut it anymore

Neither /sys/class/backlight/acpi_video0/bl_power nor /sys/class/backlight/acpi_video0/brightness nor /proc/acpi/video/GFX0/DD04/brightness have any effect.
Backlight power is apparently restored by “vbe post”.

The next challenge will be to adjust brightness from Linux.

By: pabr

pabr — Wed, 25 Mar 2009 08:35:20 +0000

xorg-x11-drv-vesa-2.2.0-3.fc10 is now in F10 updates. Thank you (and Adam) for the tip !

However I am still stuck with a dark LCD backlight after resuming from suspend, both in X and in text consoles. This is on a stripped-down Fedora 10 + yum update. Apparently other users with the same setup do not have this problem.

Can anyone help figure out what is needed to get the LCD backlight to work ? ACPI kernel parameters ? Laptop-specific RPMS ?

By: adamw

adamw — Fri, 20 Mar 2009 15:55:30 +0000

It’s not noticeably different from running at 1024×600 (or whatever you get without the patch, I forget). i.e., it’s slow, but not unworkably so, it’s fine for doing normal stuff like email and web. You wouldn’t want to try and watch a video or use the webcam, though.