A friend of mine asked me to install linux on his Asus EeePC 1201HA. So, I am installing Xubuntu 14.04 LTS on his laptop. This laptop has some audio and video issues when running a default Linux installation. In this post, I will discuss the audio and video setup.

This laptop uses an integrated Intel graphics controller. It’s known as GMA500 or Poulsbo.

$ lspci | grep VGA
00:02.0 VGA compatible controller: Intel Corporation System Controller Hub (SCH Poulsbo) Graphics Controller (rev 07)

By default, the display uses the gma500_gfx module. This module has no hardware acceleration, which causes videos to stutter. So, this is not a workable configuration.

Therefore, we will configure the Intel® Embedded Media and Graphics Driver driver. This driver is not available in an official Ubuntu repository and must be installed manually.

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:thopiekar/emgd
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install emgd-drm-dkms xserver-xorg-1.9-video-emgd

Note that we are installing a DKMS package. This means, a kernel module will be compiled. This causes the installation to take quite a while.

Once installed, a little configuration is required. First, we must disable the default kernel module. Create a file /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist-gma500.conf with the following content:

#use the EMGD driver instead
blacklist gma500_gfx

Then we must configure X. Create a file /etc/X11/xorg.conf with the following content:

Section "Device"
    Identifier "Intel EMGD"
    Driver     "emgd"
EndSection

Section "Screen"
	Identifier "Screen0"
	Device "Intel EMGD"
	SubSection "Display"
		Modes "1366x768"
	EndSubSection
EndSection

The video is not the only thing that stuters on this laptop. There are audio problems as well. However the solution for this issue is much simpler then the solution for the video problem. Just changing one line. A solution for this problem is found is described on the Debian wiki for a different model in the EeePC series. Edit the file /etc/pulse/default.pa and add tsched=0 to the line saying load-module module-udev-detect, so in the end, it reads:

load-module module-udev-detect tsched=0

And that’s it… the laptop works as a charm!