Intel 2.10.0 driver running on Wary

Wooo hooo! Break out the champagne! This is "the best of both worlds!"

Right now I'm running Wary, but on steroids. Running the xorg-server 1.6.0 and xf86-video-intel (the Intel X.org driver) 2.10.0.

I have been tossing an idea around in my head for a couple of days, whether it is possible to have the best of both worlds. That is, we have our basic Wary with the original Xorg 7.3. And of course, we do have the commercial Nvidia and ATI drivers that we can provide as PETs -- and we have already done so for Nvidia. But my little Acer netbook is left out in the cold, with its Intel Pineview graphics... so, I wondered, would it be possible to do something like we are doing with the Nvidia PETs, a big package with all the upgrades needed to drive the recent Intel graphics chips.

If such a PET is possible, then we really do have the best of both worlds, as the base-Wary is optimum for older hardware, yet, just install one PET and we have upgraded to drivers that work on the latest video hardware.

I was working on this idea last night and all day today. I lot of work finding out what packages to upgrade, and what versions. But, it is running right now, and seems to be flawless. Even Mplayer runs at both 16-bit and 24-bit color depths.

Now, I have to go through the entire exercise again, with a fresh pup-save file, as I compiled libX11 without 'xcb' support, but found that the synaptics driver needs X11 to have xcb support. That will require upgrading the xcb package also.

This is so much fun. I am very keen to try this out on my netbook. Note, the reason that I chose the 2.10.0 Intel driver is it is the first one that supports the Pineview graphics:

Driver for Intel Integrated Graphics Chipsets: i810, i810-dc100, i810e, i815, i830M, 845G, 852GM/855GM, 865G, 915G, E7221 (i915), 915GM, 945G, 945GM, 945GME, Pineview GM, Pineview G, 965G, G35, 965Q, 946GZ, 965GM, 965GME/GLE, G33, Q35, Q33, GM45, 4 Series, G45/G43, Q45/Q43, G41, B43, Clarkdale, Arrandale

The reason that I chose the 1.6.0 Xorg server is that is the earliest version that works with the 2.10.0 driver. It also requires the least other Xorg and other packages to be upgraded.

When I do create the final PET, I will document the compile steps. There are still a lot of details to work out, so it might take a couple more days.

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Comments

Good news for old Pups
Username: A suggestion
That is really good news Barry, I'd hate to see old hardware get left behind. Just one question/suggestion. Would it be theoretically possible to develop a "jumbo" pet with all of the newer graphics drivers in? well, I know that's probably possible but my second question is could a user just select the driver they want from the "jumbo" pet and discard all of the others? I'm thinking of those who install Puppy on older hardware with unusual graphics drivers.

ATI drivers
Username: panzerpuppy
"All we need now is support for modern ATI (Radeon) cards: - the latest commercial ATI driver - Catalyst 10.9 hotfix (not the plain vanilla 10.9, it's much worse) - the latest open-source X.org driver (radeon) for modern ATI cards - the latest MESA (from GIT)

Commercial ATI driver
Username: panzerpuppy
"It's a bit tricky to get the commercial ATI driver running on Wary/Quirky. If Barry can modify Wary and Quirky to make it possible to use the official driver installer from AMD, that would be *awesome*. The installer worked in older Puppies, but does not in Quirky/Wary. You have to do this first: 'make modules_prepare' (at /usr/src/linux) to prepare the kernel for building external modules. or you won't get any hardware acceleration.

LZO compression for SFS
Username: Iguleder
"Barry, Squashfs 4.1 was released and supports LZO (already in 2.6.36!) and LZMA (not yet in mainline kernel). LZO compression could be a good addition to Wary - less CPU power needed to decompress SFSs.

More on upgraded X
Username: BarryK
"See later post: http://bkhome.org/archive/blog2/201010/x-upgrade-pet-for-wary.html

Tags: wary