The exceptional power of an Ubuntu 9.10 live CD

I have been looking at some strange hardware lately, and one piece of hardware that turned up on my desk was a panel PC, with cables hanging out of the back of it. Many people had tried to install various types of OSes onto the thing with no success, that was until I turned up with an Ubuntu 9.10 x86_64 CD.

We got to a X screen within 10 seconds, while one guy was still explaining to a small group of people that getting X to work on this device would be next to impossible. Needless to say he has kept his mouth shut for over a week now, basically to stop us all wetting ourselves again.

It has many new components including a new Intel graphics chipset, and Ubuntu detected and installed a driver for them all and worked perfectly. It allowed us to test the unit for a specific task that we had, which was all that wa required at this stage.

I'm sure with the correct drivers other OSes could be made to work this unit, but why would you bother when it just works with Ubuntu.

Enabling kernel mode setting with Ubuntu 9.10

One of the great new features of the latest release of the Linux kernel, is the ability to move a lot of the graphical processing into a kernel module, which speeds up the whole graphic experience. This does not work for all graphical cards, but it certainly does work for Intel graphics cards. Testing this latest release on my Dell XPS which does have an Intel graphics card is obviously ready for the job.

The process with this version is very simple, as the ability to use this driver has been turned on in the kernel since later versions of the 2.6.30 kernel. So I just need to tell Ubuntu 9.10 to use it. You do this by adding a new file in the follwoing directory /etc/mpdprobe.d/ and you call that file i915-kms.conf. You add a single line in this file like this

options i915 modeset=1

You now need to re-boot you machine, as we need to reload the kernel. You can test that this has loaded properly by typing the following at the command line.

dmesg | grep drm - thanks to Bryce Harrington for that info

You should see something like this:

[ 8.232629] [drm] Initialized drm 1.1.0 20060810
[ 9.572258] [drm] fb0: inteldrmfb frame buffer device
[ 9.587335] [drm] Initialized i915 1.6.0 20080730 for 0000:00:02.0 on minor 0
[ 10.235837] [drm] LVDS-8: set mode 1280x800 10

You can also check the file /var/log/Xorg.0.log, and grep that for dri, which well tell you that driver has successfully loaded and is being used by your xserver.

(II) intel(0): [DRI2] Setup complete
(II) UXA(0): Driver registered support for the following operations:
(II) intel(0): direct rendering: DRI2 Enabled
(II) AIGLX: Loaded and initialized /usr/lib/dri/i965_dri.so

You can now turn on all your graphical effects (compiz), and it will work far more efficiently and more importantly at a far faster speed.

Trying out Kernel mode setting Intel acceleration with Ubuntu Jaunty

*** Be Warned this is highly experimental and could cause you hours of wasted lifetime if you don't fully understand what you are doing. You can just wait for the next release of Ubuntu, when this will be built in. ****


I have had one or two minor graphic problems on my Dell XPS1330 with Ubuntu jaunty, which is to do with the transition of the type of graphics driver which is going to be installed with the next release of Ubuntu. One of the key features in the next release of Ubuntu will be the ability to use kernel mode setting which shifts responsibility for selecting and setting up the graphics mode from X.org to the kernel. This speeds this up, which means a better experience for the user.

Here is how I did it on my Dell.

First download these .deb files from here:

http://kernel.ubuntu.com/~kernel-ppa/mainline/v2.6.31-rc9/

linux-headers-2.6.31-020631rc9_2.6.31-020631rc9_all.deb
linux-headers-2.6.31-020631rc9-generic_2.6.31-020631rc9_i386.deb
linux-image-2.6.31-020631rc9-generic_2.6.31-020631rc9_i386.deb

Install them, but don't reboot just yet.

Next install the latest Intel graphics drivers using these links:

deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/ubuntu-x-swat/x-updates/ubuntu jaunty main
deb-src http://ppa.launchpad.net/ubuntu-x-swat/x-updates/ubuntu jaunty main

Then in a terminal run this:

sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get upgrade

Now create this file /etc/modprobe.d/i915-kms.conf and add this line.

options i915 modeset=1

Then finally run this command at a terminal.

sudo update-initramfs -u

Now re-boot your machine with your new kernel and test to see if you get improved graphics performance, I most definitely did. You might also want to check in /etc/X11/xorg.conf that you have a line like this:

Option "AccelMethod" "uxa" in the "Device" section.

Have fun.