Acer D270 graphic support with GMA3600

Question

I have an Acer D20 with an Intel GMA3600 card. Is graphic acceleration for this card supported? Videos, flash, and other graphic intensive operations struggle with the current setup.

Answer 1

Sorry for breaking in and reviving this.

Later in August, Ubuntu 12.04.1 will have this working.

Until then there are hints here on solving this.

A successful Lubuntu installation can be found here.

These instructions for building a vaapi-enabled mplayer absolutely work wonders.

An Adobe Flash plugin with hardware acceleration can be taken from MeeGo. Download the MeeGo Flash plugin (flash-plugin-10.2.0-Meego_Release.rpm) and replace your currently installed libflashplayer.so.

There's more discussion here about this.

However the GMA36x0 series GPU from Intel (or PowerVR-SGX545 from Imagination Technologies which it is based upon) will never have a 64-bit driver according to Intel. When you review the specs of PowerVR SGX545 might enlighten the views; the GPU is only 32-bit hardware with ability to "emulate" 64 bits. So we may be able to run 64-bit OS in the Atom N2600 series processors as long as we have a nice changeover to 32-bits for the GPU.

Answer 2

Intel does not support the gma3600 on Linux. There is an open source driver in the linux kernel, and it is in rapid development.

It is unclear if the open source driver will ever offer 3d or accelerated graphics.

You will need to compile a custom kernel , 3.3 or higher.

Or you can install a mainline kernel:

http://kernel.ubuntu.com/~kernel-ppa/mainline/

Please note:

The mainline kernels builds are produced for debugging purposes and therefore come with no support. Use them at your own risk.

https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Kernel/MainlineBuilds

Alternately you can use Ubuntu 12.10, which will give you a higher kernel then 12.04, but 12.10 is in alpha, so expect bugs.

You can try alternate distributions. Fedora 17 will keep you on the cutting edge of kernels as will Arch.

See also

http://communities.intel.com/thread/28472

http://communities.intel.com/thread/29157

http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1953734

If you do manage to get it working, on behalf of all gma3600/3650 users, please document how on the Ubuntu wiki.

Answer 3

I am writing this from Slackware running on the DN2800 in 16:9 using a nonstandard configuration that gives surprisingly high speed streaming video, in particular, the peacekeeper benchmark compares favorably with the W7 version. I have tried this trick on Ubuntu and Ubuntu may support it, but needs some work:

1. Get the old 915resolution program and add a few lines to recognize the Cedarview chipset from Intel.

2. Get the uvesafb.ko module for your kernel and the latest fbdev_drv.so xorg driver.

3. Run the following script before running startx (or after):

   915resolution -c Cedarview 54 1366 768 32 /sbin/modprobe uvesafb mode_option=1366x768-32 scroll=ywrap vram_total=8
   

4. Make sure the xorg.conf expects fbdev as the graphics driver so that starting, or restarting, has the fbdev_drv.so picking up the mode 54 which is set for 16: 9. (Best set up by Ubuntu gurus)

5. Use your administrator privileges to find or download a TTF font with only bold subfonts (you may have to go to /usr/share/fonts/TTF and delete some subfonts). Set your web browsers to use these bold-only fonts.

The result works in full screen and gives very fast streaming video rendering, although your monitor will tell you that it is running 1024x768.

Recommended are any flash plugin that works with Ubuntu and the xine video player with the Ubuntu xine plugin for Firefox.