Resynthesize Tutorial

Resynthesizing can lead to unwanted results sometimes, especially if you have uneven and complicated surfaces. This tutorial shows you step by step how to get the results you want!

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Amazingly Great Image Fixup from the coming Photoshop CS for free with GIMP

Photoshop will introduce a really cool, new feature in the coming CS version. But with Gimp, they're shipped at least with any debian based distribution now already! Check out resynthesize here and texturize.

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Moblin 2.1 IVI FC Release tested on the MSI Wind U110 (GMA 500/Poulsbo)

Phoronix hasn't gotten to it yet, but now I've done a quick test with the Moblin distribution IVI version with supposed GMA 500 support (moblin-2.1-preview-ivi-20091208.img) to see how well it's working on my netbook and what feature advantages its IEGD driver may have over the psb driver.

Well, it's not a lot:

• The resolution was set to 800x600. No other resolutions were detected (xrandr -q)
• The colors were distorted. It looked like 256 colors but randomly exchanged.
• The touchpad was not working. The mouse moved in seemingly opposite or random directions and kept skipping back and forth. I had to use an external mouse to do anything at all.
• The sound wasn't working, thought that might possibly be fixed by disabling power saving, just like in Ubuntu
• Wifi wasn't working. I could not add networks or configure the wifi. " Join other Network" was greyed out. The iwconfig tools have to be started manually from /sbin. They found a network, but I didn't bother to try to set it up with wpa_supplicant manually. A path is not set. wpa_supplicant was already running with 99% cpu usage when I boot.
• Switching to the console and back is impossible. It completely and irreversibly crashes the graphics until a reboot.
• ACPI showed tons of errors in dmesg.
• Trying to suspend crashed the system.
• I wonder if there's an application in the distribution that can take advantage of VAAPI accelerated video decoding. There is a video player. But I had no easy access to the hard drive's partitions (ntfs).

The distribution as tested on my netbook is in two words:
utterly unusable.

The psb driver set up according to my howto works flawlessly compared to that! It interesting how difficult it seems to be for Intel to get its own chipset to work in its own distribution with its own driver.

But, yes. Moblin was very snappy. ;-) (I think that just shows just how cool XFCE is, though.)

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More News on Intel and its GMA 500 under Linux

The LinuxJournal wrote two articles about the horrible Linux support for Intel's GMA 500 graphics chipset.
How to kick your friends in the face - GMA500
More on Poulsbo GMA 500 - Intel and the Community

Also see the Intel defending response.

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Why you're screwed with the Intel Poulsbo Chipset

Let me tell you why you're not only screwed when you want to run Poulsbo systems on Linux:

Intel does not only have bad support for Linux, it even excludes any email support, even for Windows for the Intel Poulsbo Chipset: "Intel does not support this product via email."

see http://supportmail.intel.com/scripts-emf/defaultlanding.aspx?productid=3180&srchidstr=39,1101,3180 and it seems does no longer supply driver downloads: http://downloadcenter.intel.com/NotFound.aspx?ProductID=3180&lang=eng. Ok, the last is wrong: http://downloadcenter.intel.com/Detail_Desc.aspx?agr=Y&ProductID=3001&DwnldID=17992&strOSs=45&OSFullName=Windows%20XP%20Home%20Edition*&lang=eng

Now what other support options are there from Intel? Contacting your manufacturer often does not prove helpful either. MSI's support even seem aware that the Poulsbo chipset is supposed to have active video decoding acceleration. They inform that the Poulsbo chipset is not a high end chipset and you shall just disable video decoding acceleration in case it crashes your Windows system.

Considering the overal bad support for the Poulsbo chipset I can not recommend using it: No good Linux driver, no good Windows driver, DXVA announced but not working(not even in Windows), no email support, no Windows driver downloads, etc.

So I think: don't buy Poulsbo systems.

Intel advertises features it can't deliver and doesn't support the chipset. And it's really sad to bring out a chipset that won't be supported well until maybe 2010.

Update: I've finally managed to get poulsbo working on my MSI Wind U110 netbook. Check out the dirty hack and the details.

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NVIDIA Brings Fast GPU Video Acceleration to Linux

It's been a while. I've sat here on my chair for a long time and thought to myself: Hey, if you want to do it, video acceleration would be really easy to integrate into Linux software: It's mostly open source and the changed would be pretty specific to that part.

Then came XvMC and it was not really convincing, because the impact was not too fast and it only worked during playback Mpeg2 AFAIK, not during transconding.

Now came NVIDIA (admittedly a couple weeks after AMD, but therefore publicly and including patches for mplayer) and finally brought out really nice and efficient video acceleration for linux.

My favorite Linux Performance News Site Phoronix checked it out and you can see quite an improvement (CPU usage with first OpenGL, then XVideo and then Nvidia's "VDPAU"(Video Decode and Presentation API).

I hope AMD and Intel will finally come out with some progress in this area, too. Next I would like to see support for encoding, e.g. in Xvid and then maybe even tasks such as gzip, bzip2 (the latter ones didn't even show multi-core support in my tests).

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Mode Setting with IntelFB

Let me begin by stating that the intelfb driver is very old already. And there are issues. Mode setting with "non-CRT" devices usually fails:

intelfb: Non-CRT device is enabled ( LVDS port ). Disabling mode switching.
intelfb: Video mode must be programmed at boot time.

So you need to set the mode very counter-intuitively via the vga kernel commandline. To do that, you need to know the mode. Especially on 64-bit systems the only way to find it out is sudo hwinfo --vbe.

Now you can use a kernel command line like video=intelfb:mode=1280x800 vga=0x0362 and the system should boot with the chosen resolution. Even if you're using a laptop like I am.

This will not work with a kernel earlier than 2.6.28-rc1 from my experience, but maybe you're lucky. If nothing happens, try the newest kernel. And of course feel free to comment in any case. And I think this works only if the intelfb module is compiled-in, not if it's compiled as a module, as it usually is in distribution kernels.

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Optimize PNGs

OptiPNG is a cool little program to optimize png graphics in size. You can further optimize the size with advpng from the package advancecomp.

E.g.

1. optipng -q -o5 scummvm00000.bmp
2. advpng -z -4 scummvm00000.png

901k bmp -> 40k png -> 36k png. Lossless.

And a script: 

#!/bin/sh

echo "ShrinkBMP v. 0.2 (c) 2008, published under GPL 3.0."

for i in $*; do

echo compressing $i...

optipng -q -o5 "$i"

PNG="`echo $i | sed s/bmp/png/ `"

advpng -z -4 "$PNG"

ls -l $i $PNG

echo ...done.

done;

echo All done: $* 

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