Two items of news related to Linux support on the Menlow platorm have caught my attention in the last 24 hours. Both news items are related to the Ubuntu Linux distribution.
Menlow is the Intel platform that many MIDs, UMPCs and even netbooks and laptops have been built around in the last 12 months. It’s focused towards very low power consumption, video playback acceleration and 3D support in the smallest possible size.
Up until now, the only official operating systems that have supported the platform have been Moblin 1 (via Intel. Largely a static project now) and Windows XP, Vista and 7. Trying to use any of the latest popular Linux distributions on any of these devices results in problems.
Ubuntu, the Linux distribution run by Canonical, has always had a close relationship with UMPCs and MIDs. They did some work on Moblin 1 with the Ubuntu-MID distribution but that project is now static. Then there was Ubuntu-Mobile which turned into Ubuntu UMPC. Again, this project stopped. The Ubuntu Netbook Remix project also started and this is the one that has been focused on over the last 12 months. Unfortunately, it doesn’t have any support for the graphics/video part on Menlow known as ‘Poulsbo’. The same is true of Moblin 2. Intel dropped support for the MID platform.
The good news is that there are people out there working to fix the problem. The latest information is that one ‘lucazade’ has rolled up everything that is needed into a few scripts and has even set up a repository that can be used to pick up the correct drivers. Full information at the bottom of this post.
The second bit of good news is that Jolicloud, the Ubuntu-based distribution targeted at netbooks, is also checking out support for GMA500. This message went out yesterday:
team is testing internally the poulsbo (gma 500) support in the next jolicloud release, we will look soon for testers.
Naturally we’ve already been in contact with the Jolicloud team about this and plan to bring you some more information shortly.
Despite all this third-party activity and end-user requirement (about 30 Menlow-based devices exist in the market right now) Intel has never really talked about Menlow support. We’ve seen Moblin 2.1 for handhelds running on Menlow and seen the Linux Foundation demonstrating it but I can’t get any statement out of them on the subject.
Based on what we’ve seen and heard I would put money on being able to run the open source beta release of Moblin 2.1 for handhelds on Menlow (purely because there’s no other platform available for developers to test on) and that is supposed to be coming within the next month. I’m also convinced that Moorestown will use the GMA500 so there’s another reason to have drivers available.
Finally, check out some of the emails in the Moblin Developer mailing list. This is an interesting one for example. (from 15th Nov.)
If you know of other Linux distributions that either work with or are planning GMA500 support (I hear rumors that Mandriva supports GMA500?) let everyone know in the comments. Likewise, if you’re running Linux on a Menlow platform, let us know what you think.
Update: 18th Nov 2009. Jolicloud have announced out-of-the-box support for the GMA500.
Good News for Linux/Menlow Netbooks, UMPCs and MIDs | UMPCPortal …: Two items of news related to.. http://bit.ly/LFgGe
#Linux #News
Good News for Linux/Menlow Netbooks, UMPCs and MIDs | UMPCPortal … http://bit.ly/3qI4D
I am running Fedora 11 on my Archos 9 tablet (Atom Z510 and GMA500 video). The required poulsbo drivers are provided by the rpmfusion repo. The is no driver for Fedora 12 (yet). Lets hope the upcoming GMA500 driver release (if any) will change that.
Mandriva 2010 has out of the box support for GMA 500, booting from the liveUSB gives me native resolution with compiz, etc.
Support in Ubuntu 9.04 was good, but required a bit of tweaking. However performance in 9.10 UNR was horrible, even with all the tweaks, perhaps I did something wrong, perhaps the situation has improved now on that…
Fedora 11 works well, I’m writing from it right now. Fedora 12 (which came out today) will not be supported since it uses a new version of X.org…
However, no solution has been adequate for my T91, either the touchscreen does not work, or it crashes the thing. So I’m waiting till a good driver comes out.
Mandriva has as far as I know the greatest support of drivers.Even when the first EeePc was released, Mandriva was the only OS that ran the EeePc701 out of the box (Xandros excluded, which was Asus’ OS of choice); including the Fn keys for volume and display brightness.
It took months before the first XP was operational on a 4GB SSD, and later Slax followed, as well as drivers where created for Ubuntu.
I’ve always been amazed at mandriva,though I would not run it on a netbook as it is quite a heavier OS than Xubuntu or Ubuntu.
After reading this post I installed Mandriva 2010 One on one partition on my Fujitsu u820 (GMA500). Graphics does indeed work out of the box, with compiz effects and all.
Touch screen, screen rotate and fujitsu hardware buttons do not work. Google and the Mandriva forums give me no hints how to enable these things on Mandriva, so I’ll probably return to Ubuntu, after tweaking graphics worked almost OK at least in Ubuntu 9.04. I’ve signed up for testing the Jolicloud alpha BTW, hope I will get an invitation.
/ Anfanglir
The touchscreen doesn’t work for me in Mandriva either, in Ubuntu one need only to install xserver-xorg-input-evtouch for it to work, but the corresponding Mandriva package does nothing.
Tried the currently available alpha of jolicloud, no poulsbo suppport in that one (yea I know they said the NEXT release will have poulsbo, but I had to check) :p