(Update 2)
As of today May 1, 2012 the latest Fedora 17 beta is working just fine. Well mostly. The backlight blinks out momentarily every once in a while. Basically all this below is out of date.
(Update 1)
First off, you probably don't want to do this. Seems it's not as stable as I thought it was and since it's using a staging driver, it taints the Kernel with a C. Still, something to look forward to when F17 is ready.
A while back I bought an Eee PC T91MT. It's the laptop with the screen that can rotate around and run in a tablet mode with a two point multitouch screen. I thought I would make a cool remote for something someday. Last time I installed Fedora on it (back on 14) I had a few issues I never really resolved.
The touch screen didn't work under linux.
The video driver was unsupported and there was a proprietary driver but the system still had issues including never shutting down and never rebooting without manual button intervention.
That's changed! I installed the 32 bit Fedora 16 from the net install and all the defaults other than custom partitioning.
Setup finished and then... just console. X wouldn't start up the login screen. Darn. I switched to another VT and logged in as root and started digging. Fortunately it didn't take long.
startx revealed X didn't want to touch the video device because a kernel driver had control.
lsmod told me there was a poulsbo driver active. rmmod poulsbo and a startx later and X started working. And for bonus points, the touch screen is working. Tryout installing the "mypaint" app. The pressure sensitive drawing works.
This was not the solution though. Next I went and blacklisted poulsbo but it still loaded on startup. I could have tried making a new initrd image but there was another problem. Video was limited to 800x600 when it did work. Not worth the effort for less than working completely.
The bad news:
Lots of stuff still doesn't work. No 3D acceleration.
Just look at what Ubuntu has to say: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/HardwareSupportComponentsVideoCardsPoulsbo#PSB-GFX_driver
Making it work
Highest level description.
Install the Kernel 3.2 from rawhide for Fedora 17. (That's what I meant by 16+)
This new kernel has pretty good support for the GMA500.
Some step by step help (Warning: Written from memory)
As root:
yum install fedora-release-rawhide
yum --enablerepo=rawhide install kernel
reboot
Known issues
- The new kernel does not become the default boot target. I manually select it on boot. You can fix it in GRUB.
- When startup completes, graphics are corrupted. There's some weird vertical wrapping. Just hit Control+Alt+Backspace and it resets and works normally.
- Sleep is broken. The computer won't wake up.
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