I’ve bought a new 11.1" netbook from Asus, this is going to replace my aging 4G Surf (named charm). I’ve named the new one up, so I’m hoping the Large Hadron Collider is up and running soon and discovers a new flavor of quarks - ‘cause I’m running out of names. (strange is already allocated if I ever buy a Mac and run Linux on that, top and bottom just don’t sound right).

This is hopefully the last time I buy a Intel only machine, turns out this machine has a GMA500 (aka poulsbo) video chipset which is not really working well.

This chip is not supported by the 100% open source driver Intel is promoting so much. Even Moblin 2.0 (A Intel sponsored distro) does not support it.

There is a git repo containing a driver which was created for Intel by a company named Tungsten Graphics.

I’m pondering getting into kernel development and also trying to code for X, so this may be a good opportunity to delve in. However, my guess is, that this kernel-X-graphics interaction is one of the more difficult areas…