pablomme's questions

After installing Ubuntu 12.04 on a Toshiba NB510 the screen resolution is 800x600 instead of the native 1024x600. This is a netbook that contains the infamous GMA3650 (aka PowerVR SGX5450) which is poorly supported by the Linux kernel. I've looked around and tried several different solutions. Namely:

• I've tried installing a newer kernel (3.3+), since some people have reported success with it. That didn't seem to fix the resolution problem.
• I've tried installing an older version of Ubuntu (10.04), since someone suggested there's an older driver that should provide basic support for the card, but the liveCD image wouldn't boot.
• I've tried using this ppa. On first reboot, the screen resolution was correct. Subsequent reboots lead to a blank screen immediately after grub.
• I've tried passing the kernel option video=1024x600 with the above PPA, to no avail.
• I've tried installing a daily build of Quantal. The live image boots with the correct resolution. The installed system boots to a blank screen. The video=1024x600 option doesn't work here either.
• On Quantal I've blacklisted the gma500_gfx driver to force the use of vesa. This causes Ubuntu to boot into a 800x600 resolution.

• After this, I've tried using the following xorg.conf:

  Section "Device"
      Identifier  "card"
      Driver      "vesa"
  EndSection
  
  Section "Monitor"
      Identifier  "panel"
      Modeline    "1024x600_DDC" 54.03 1024 1048 1184 1344 600 603 609 670 -hsync -vsync
      Option      "PreferredMode" "1024x600_DDC"
  EndSection
  
  Section "Screen"
      Identifier  "screen"
      Device      "card"
      Monitor     "panel"
      DefaultDepth    24
      SubSection "Display"
          Depth   24
          Modes   "1024x600_DDC"
      EndSubSection
  EndSection
  

  where the modeline comes from DDC, as reported in /var/log/Xorg.0.log. This seems to have no effect, with the resolution stuck at 800x600.

• Additionally, adding nomodeset to the kernel command line does not help with either the resolution problem or the blank-screen problem.

Ideally, since I don't think I can trust the gma500_gfx driver or that from Meego (the one in Sarvatt's PPA), I would like to use the vesa driver (probably reverting to 12.04), and specify the resolution in a xorg.conf file, but I can't seem to get this to work. Any ideas?

BTW, this is a problem I'm helping a friend with, I don't have direct access to the machine.

How can I use the recent beta of the 302 version of the nvidia driver (which finally supports the RandR extension!) with a realtime kernel in Precise?

This question contains information on enabling the current 295 version for the 3.4 kernel with the RT patch. But I'm looking for an answer that installs the nvidia driver using the package manager rather than nvidia's installer (whose installations break every so often due to the package management system overwriting files).