[nflug] Intel 950 Accelerated Graphics & Ubuntu

[Jesse Jarzynka]

Joe wrote:
> Went to the store with a Dapper Drake CD.  I worked on the Toshiba so 
> far.  I'm going back tomorrow for the HP.
>
> 1) Boots fine once you use ESC during boot to get into the BIOS so you 
> can set it to boot off the cdrom.
> 2) Sound seems to work OK, but pretty soft.  (I set the mixer output up.)
> 3) I got an mpeg movie to play, but was unsure of the quality.
> 4) USB flash drive OK.
> The hard drive is /dev/sda1 (for access to windoze stuff) and the usb 
> flash drive is /dev/sdb1 and automounts/dismounts nicely - offering 
> you a konqueror window to browse it with.
>
> Questions/problems:
> 1) How do I "stress" the Intel 950 Graphics accelerator enough to be 
> sure it (the driver) works correctly?
>       BTW Linux sees it as a 945 chipset.
> 2) dmesg error messages (on Live CD)
>    a) Warning:# of CPU's limit of 1 reached - Processor ignored
>    b) APIC error on cpu 0 40(40)
>          Got this one about 16 times along with some sort of table of 
> values that I didn't understand.
>          Since this is a chipset that has to do with SMP support, 
> maybe this has to do with problem (a).
> 3) Ran glxinfo and got a lot of output I didn't understand.  Is there 
> some key piece of data in it that will tell me if the 950 works?
>   The only thing that caught my interest was a table of values that 
> was mostly zeros.  There were eight rows that had non-zero data in 
> them and the last column of each said "slow".  That doesn't look too 
> encouraging.
> 4) Will actually installing it on the notebook fix the SMP problems 
> (and graphics?) during the install?
>
> TIA
>
> Joe
>
I'm gonna guess an actual install will fix the CPU stuff. It's probably 
as simple as installing the linux-686 kernel package which has SMP 
enabled by default now (no more smp specific kernels). As far as the 
graphics, the 900 chipset is actually very good because you can use the 
open source Linux driver and get hardware acceleration. See this post on 
Aiglx and Compiz in Dapper, only do the driver part though:
http://corvillus.com/2006/08/03/how-to-set-up-aiglx-and-compiz-on-ubuntu-606-running-gnome/

Something else that is interesting is yesterday Intel announced it was 
open sourcing it's 960 chipset drivers:
http://news.com.com/Intel+aims+for+open-source+graphics+advantage/2100-7344_3-6103941.html
-- 
Jesse Jarzynka
Cyber Source
http://www.jessejoe.com/
http://www.thecybersource.com/
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