Ubuntu 13.04 on the AOD207 part 2

We last left off with a working install of Ubuntu 13.04 running Gnome with all animations disabled.

The extenal VGA connector works great, but only at the two lowest resolutions (both 4:3). For everything higher it returns an error about timeout. I also tried the HDMI output, but that didn't appear to work immediately. Doh.

I read that the Intel Atom N2600 originally had some serious linux hardware compatibility problems due to the PowerVR GPU chipset they used, and while they've released linux drivers, they only work with specific old versions of xorg and the linux kernel, so you can't use the latest distros with them.

Fortunately, the folks at Arch linux have a decent howto for configuring everything to work with the open source version of the driver (gma500_gfx, which is what I'm using). From their cues, I added the following:

/usr/share/X11/xorg.conf.d $ cat 20-gpudriver.conf
Section "Device"
    Identifier "Intel GMA3600"
    Driver     "modesetting"
    Option     "Monitor-LVDS-0" "Ignore"    Option     "Monitor-VGA-0" "Monitor"
    Option     "Monitor-DVI-0" "Monitor"
EndSection
Section "Monitor"
    Identifier "Ignore"
    # Option     "Ignore" # uncommenting this line prevents the backlight from turning on for some reason. why would you want that?!
EndSection
Section "Monitor"
    Identifier "Monitor"
    Option     "Enable"
EndSection

This didn't break the working VGA, but it also didn't add anymore modes or fix the HDMI, so I undid it. :-P

Backlight

While the backlight is at least on by default now, I realized just now that I couldn't turn it down or otherwise adjust it. The fix from before still seems to work though, so good!

Well, that's good enough for now. Maybe I'll upgrade the memory this weekend, but otherwise I don't have too many complaints, except maybe the limited external monitor modes... hrm. Another day.