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I recently purchased a ASUS 1225C cedar trail netbook. It didn't come preinstalled with Ubuntu like it comes in some markets. I installed Ubuntu 12.04 LTS on it. While Ubuntu works just fine, I am bothered by the lack of proper graphics support because of intel gma 3600. I am aware that this is not a problem of Ubuntu.

My question is this: How does ASUS manage to sell these netbooks in other markets with Ubuntu preinstalled? How does ASUS manage to get everything to work? And if they can, why aren't I able to do the same?

link: For more on Asus 1225C

As you can see, they show Ubuntu working perfectly in the screenshots. Is this false advertising?

2 Answers 2

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Update

A driver for Intel's GMA3600 (aka CedarView) has been added to the Ubuntu repositories, and should be available through Additional Drivers.

Note: the driver is only available for Ubuntu 12.04.1, 32bit. It doesn't work on 12.04.2 or 12.10.

CedarView driver

Additional Drivers support

We don't have the driver, or, in other words, the driver is not freely available, but I can't speak for Asus, Intel, or PoweVR. Asus could have licensed the proprietary driver, or it could use the free gma500_gfx driver, which would be enough to take perfect screenshots.

Perhaps you can contact Asus, and ask.

PowerVR chips are actually quite good, the problem is closed binary drivers and the lack of readily available Linux support.

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  • So there is no hope of the situation improving in the future then? Aug 8, 2012 at 4:59
  • Much info is lacking to reach conclusions either way, and I don't want to guess. If people buy those machine in large enough quantities, driver support may improve. Aug 8, 2012 at 5:05
  • Than why is PowerVR Graphics/Media Drivers listed for download at Intel Download Center
    – RanRag
    Aug 10, 2012 at 13:08
  • What do you mean why? Why not? Aug 10, 2012 at 15:50
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    What about Ubuntu 12.10, will proprietary drivers work after upgrading from 12.04?
    – joshas
    Nov 6, 2012 at 22:30
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There are open source drivers in more recent kernels, I am not sure of the exact kernel version, somewhere around 3.2-3.5 or so.

Your video card should work with the open source drivers on Ubuntu 12.10 or 13.04.

The open source drivers are 2d only. They work "well" with KDE and XFCE, but gnome is slow as 3d effects are emulated via llvmpipe. llvmpipe uses your CPU and when I tried it in the past X uses 70% + CPU time.

If you want to try the cutting edge of X, I highly suggest Fedora. llvmpipe is back ported to Ubuntu, so Fedora has a more recent versions of kernel + llvmpipe.

Last I looked at llvmpipe on Ubuntu is here: How to install LLVMpipe?

The closed source drivers are required for 3d effecta and are not working on linux. There have been claims by some people to get the closed source drivers working, but it is a nasty hack and I have not seen a working tutorial nor have I been able to replicate their claims on my hardware.

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