Have you ever tried just turning off the TV?

My girlfriend got an work netbook the other day. The only thing it should be able to do is edit documents and once in a while show videos over a projector at the class she teaches.

The netbook was used and came with windows 7. Everything kind of worked, but it was slow and unsatisfactory.

So I said OK.. we’ll put Linux on there and it will fly. I chose to use xubuntu since Xfce is known to have a small footprint. And as it turns out that was true. The machine felt much faster. But there is always a “BUT” somewhere. The machine has an intel GMA500 (poulsbo) graphics card. The official support for this card is almost non existent. Luckily we have people who worked out how to make this thing work and using this I got the gorgeous 1366x768 resolution display working.

There was a problem dough. When looking at the display settings the only available mode was for 1366x768. Xrandr confirmed this:

tom@smaltom:~$ xrandr
Screen 0: minimum 320 x 200, current 1366 x 768, maximum 2646 x 1024
LVDS0 connected 1366x768+0+0 (normal left inverted right x axis y axis)
256mm x 144mm
1366x768       60.0*+
SDVO-1 disconnected (normal left inverted right x axis y axis)

That is a problem because I needed to get the vga port working with a cloned image on there. In class my girlfriend needs to see what is on the projection behind her when she faces the class.

Since the projector has a native resolution of 1024x768 we need that resolution on the LCD screen. As it turns out it is easy to force xrandr to use a different resolution.

As described here we just do the following…

We get the raw data for a desired resolution and refresh rate:

tom@smaltom:~$ cvt 1280 1024 60

Then we use that to add the mode to the LDVS0 screen that represents the netbook LCD:

tom@smaltom:~$ xrandr --newmode "1024x768_60.00"  63.50  
               1024 1072 1176 1328 768 771 775 798 -hsync +vsync
tom@smaltom:~$ xrandr --addmode LVDS0 1024x768_60.00

Now we can, when something is connected to the VGA port, enable the new mode and also the projector.

tom@smaltom:~$ xrandr --output LVDS0 --mode 1024x768_60.00 --pos 0x0 
               --output RGB0-1 --mode 1024x768 --pos 0x0

We get a perfect clone. For the convenience I added two icons on the top panel so it is really simple to switch between modes.

There was only one thing left that annoyed me. The Fn+(F1-F12) hotkeys didn’t really work. As it turns out this is also easy to fix.

We have to edit the /etc/default/grub file. Where we change the following line:

GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT=
"nosplash pciehp.pciehp_force=1 pciehp.pciehp_poll_mode=1
 elevator=deadline acpi_backlight=vendor acpi_osi=Linux"

Some of the switches probably aren’t necessary, but people say they help:D

After this procedure we have a working netbook that runs quite fast and has a nice and sharp picture. It can also be connected to a projector and be used for presentations and video playback.

Hopefully this little adventure is the first of many I find time to share on this blog.