I have a laptop, not much, but portable! Let me list it’s basics, then I’ll explain what I did to really get this thing rolling! It runs so much better now!
The System: A Toshiba Satellite L45-S4587
Processor: Intel Pentium Dual Core Mobile T2080 1.73Ghz
RAM: 2GB 533Mhz CL2 Ram (Upgraded from 1GB)
Video: Intel Onboard 945GM (8Mb Shared Memory)
HDD: WD 160Gb 7200RPM (Upgraded from stock 80Gb)
Screen: TFT 15.4″ at 1280×800 Resolution
One of the nice things about this laptop is the ability to output to VGA to other screens. While the stock intel drivers for windows worked very well and managed the screens only when an external display was attached, the Ubuntu driver simply sucks. Upon watching a movie through my laptop to my 37″ LCD TV through the RGB input, my screen shrunk to 1024×768. I couldn’t get out of that resolution and I then had found out that my “xorg.conf” file was edited and pretty much borked.
So, I went on a mission to fix it for good. I took the search to Google. I found that Ubuntu Jaunty has some really bad issues with the intel driver and the current kernel in the 9.04. So, I was at a loss. I was “thinking” about going down to the 8.04 LTS package and go from there. But alas, Google had been a life saver again!
My searching brought me to a post at the Ubuntu Forums, as usual. “How To: Jaunty Intel Graphics” for short. I’m not going to quote the process on the post, if you want that information I’ll add the link at the end of my post. But the post had more detailed information relating to the problems I’ve already read so much about. I was finally considering the process. Mind you, I’ve never undertook much more then the first parts of this guide in anything with Ubuntu. I was worried about switching my kernel in every which way. I wasn’t really sure of my capability to do such a change but I was willing to do anything. Especially after watching a movie that had random skips in it.
Turns out, the biggest problem is the memory addressing going out of a specified range and basically causing the ram that’s being used by the card to become extremely fragmented. This means, the drivers couldn’t keep a location set for the shared video ram and this is where the stuttering and the like had been coming from. So the very first part was to get into the seat of the newest driver and install this “miracle script” so it can better manage the video ram. “Alright, let’s try it!” I reconfigured my xorg.conf with a safe setup and used the recommended settings in the post and updated my drivers. I also installed the script and had it start on boot for Gnome and KDE since I run both. I rebooted with “some” worry, but everything went smoothly! Here’s the first results.
I averaged about 140FPS in glxgears at the standard setting. This was horrible, compared to my 8800GTS in my desktop getting over 15,000! This was before the added script and drivers along with the xorg.conf edits.
After the edits, my framerates in the standard glxgears output had easily doubled to 320fps averages! I was amazed and all of my compiz Fusion effects were so much smoother!
“This is AWESOME! I can’t believe how fast this thing is going!!!” I just had to go on and continue to the point of installing the 2.6.30 kernel from the guide! I couldn’t wait. My connection took forever to get the entire kernel packages and this just brought up the anxious feelings to even more exceedingly high levels. Once it was done, I went ahead with the dpkg and it was done. I had the install ready. All I had to do from here was reboot. I was worried! I didn’t know what to expect. All I can say is that I was clearly saying goodbye to Jaunty in a whole. I didn’t think it’d boot at all! So I hit the reboot option and watched it boot up. Everything was exactly the same aside from my kernel name in my conky! “Everything is working correctly.. No problems.. Hmmm.”
It was time for the test! I started glxgears and was ready for my test! The first report showed only 200fps and I was immediately thinking that I broke it. Then the second one blew my mind. 560 frames a second, WOW! 580, then 602! I was stunned! After about 20 to average with I had come up with about 593fps for an average. I couldn’t believe my eyes! Compiz runs perfectly smooth with all of the effects turned up and even KDE runs perfect with all of it’s wonderful but system dragging eye candy! It was simply unbelievable!
So, I went from a tearing and miserable compiz with skipping movies to ultra smooth and high quality movie experiences within an hour. After everything, I must say that this has been one of the best upgrades I’ve ever done manually to anything. There’s no chance I’ll be reverting any time soon!
I can’t take any of the credit myself as I’m still deep into the learning process and haven’t done anything this “advanced” to my own linux system until now. I will say however, everything on the guide was easy to follow and even a newbie could probably manage to get as far as I did without any problem!
As I stated before, I am posting the url to the post on Ubuntu Forums for you here.
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1130582
This post is not affiliated with System Overload.net in any way and we take no responsibility for any problems or errors you encounter if you decide to follow this guide. Use their guide at your own risk, I just figured that it may be able to help someone as much as it did for me. So remember, that post is not affiliated with this website in any way or form. The information there is theirs and following their guides are your own risk, not ours.
I hope this post inspires someone to achieve a good fix themselves as it did for me. I went from a sloppy and choppy system to a really nice smooth experience. I’m used to having to buy a new $200 video card to get this much of a boost in performance!
