EasyOS now works on new laptop

July 22, 2019 — BarryK

I reported earlier today that Linux crashed on my new-ish Acer Aspire 1 laptop. That included EasyOS, Quicky, Debian and Mint, but I found an old version of Quircky worked. Earlier post:

http://bkhome.org/news/201907/linux-crashes-on-new-laptop.html

Easy booted to the commandline, no X, and all is well. Start X, and there is a freeze.

There are a gadzillion reports on the Internet of PCs with Intel video freezing, so this is not something new. In fact, Xorg now defaults to using the Xorg 'modesetting' driver rather than the 'intel' driver, in most cases, but not always.

Just checked on the tower-PC running right now, it is using 'modesetting'. On the Mele PCG35 mini-PC, again, using 'modesetting'. Booting Easy 1.0.92 on the Acer Aspire 1 laptop, manage to save /var/log/Xorg.o/log before X freezes ...also using modesetting.

Hmmm, so how about I force Xorg to use the 'intel' driver? Yes, that does fix it, however, it is mighty odd the 'modesetting' driver works fine in the Mele but not on the Acer.

I don't know an elegant way to force the override. Created a new script /etc/rc.d/rc.hacks, called from /etc/rc.d/rc.sysinit, that detects this particular GPU and creates /etc/X11/xorg.conf.d/intel-gpu-5a85.conf. This is the content of rc.hacks:

#!/bin/sh
#hacks for special cases, called from rc.sysinit

#190722 xorg mostly defaults to using 'modesetting' driver for intel video.
#however, for this one, force use of 'intel' driver...
FNDGPU="$(lspci -n -d 8086:5a85:0300)"
if [ "$FNDGPU" ];then
 if [ ! -f /etc/X11/xorg.conf.d/intel-gpu-5a85.conf ];then
 echo 'Section "Device"
    Identifier "intel"
    Driver "intel"
EndSection' > /etc/X11/xorg.conf.d/intel-gpu-5a85.conf
 fi
else
 [ -f /etc/X11/xorg.conf.d/intel-gpu-5a85.conf ] && rm -f /etc/X11/xorg.conf.d/intel-gpu-5a85.conf
fi

...there is probably a more elegant way of doing this. Note, Xorg is defaulting to using 'uxa' acceleration with the 'intel' driver. Note also, the 'modesetting' driver defaults to using 'glamor' acceleration.

Tags: easy