Status of the GMA 500 driver

[Tomasz Chmielewski]

Adam Jackson wrote:

> On Thu, 2008-12-04 at 21:34 -0500, Josh Adams wrote:
>> I recently bought a new Dell Inspiron Mini 12 with the hope of putting
>> Linux on it as soon as I got it, only to discover that there doesn't
>> seem to be support the GMA 500 chipset that it uses.  While I can trim
>> a lot of the fat off of Vista to get it in a semi-usable state, I'd
>> much rather be running Arch or Fedora on it.  Anyways, I realize now
>> that this is a new chipset and I was having trouble finding any
>> information about this chipset with linux after much googling, so I
>> figured it would be best to go straight to the source.
> 
> The GMA500 is not really an Intel chip, it's a PowerVR core glued onto
> one.  Fairly sure it's not the same thing as the 'vermilion' driver
> we've got, but hard to say without PCI IDs.  Sensible open source
> support is rumored to be forthcoming though.

Did anything change with respect to GMA 500 support since this message 
was posted (the beginning of December 2008)?


I too wanted to buy this netbook (Dell mini 12), it comes with Ubunutu 
(8.04?), so probably I will want to either upgrade the distro to a newer 
version or change it.


-- 
Tomasz Chmielewski
http://wpkg.org