Tuesday, April 24, 2012

[SOLVED] Precise Pangolin: Asus eee PC Issue with GMD500 & display problem with half screen display

For quite sometime I was trying to load Ubuntu 12.04 LTS beta1 and beta2 to my Asus Eee PC 1101HA with 1.34 Ghz Intel Atom processor and 1 GB DDR3 RAM. Somehow the distro would get installed but not boot to a GUI due to GMD500.

Either it won't  load or even if it loads the display would be half the screen.

Finally I found a way to get around. Once the black screen comes press Ctrl - Alt - F2, it will go to the terminal boot. Enter your login and password.

What we need to do now is edit grub. Write

sudo nano /etc/default/grub

It will open the grub to edit.

Change the line -

GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT=”quiet splash”

to

GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="poulsbo.blacklist=yes console=tty1"

Press Ctrl+x to exit and Y to save the change.

Type in terminal

sudo update-grub

 Grub would be updated in a minute and then type

sudo reboot

to restart.

Now the GUI would appear without any pain and Ubuntu 12.04 would run smoothly on your Asus laptop.

The same solution works for other systems with GMD500.

Below is a screenshot of Xubuntu 12.04 on my 1101HA.


19 comments:

  1. i have tried this and it didn't work.
    is there any more you can tell me?
    Rob

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  2. Thank you, this worked perfectly for me on a Asus Eee PC.

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  3. Thank you very much, it worked perfectly on my EEE 1101HA!
    Aldo

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  4. arindam sen, Your fix worked perfectly on my Dell Mini 1010. Yours is the only "fix" that I have found on the WEB!

    Again, many thanks. --Dee--

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  5. Great! It works. Thank you very much. Any hints to improve games performance on Asus Eee PC 1101HA? They are really slow ...

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    Replies
    1. Games won't work as both RAM and graphic memory are low in Asus Eee PC 1101HA. Can't do anything over there :(

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  6. Thank you very much man!
    It works perfectly now!

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  7. Thanks! It was hard to leave my old "notebook-edition", but neccessary to update, and this bugfix worked perfectly

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  8. It really worked! Thank you a lot, i was about to give it up. Nice work!

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  9. The workaround is not necessary in Quantal Quetzal - it boots up to a black screen and then to the desktop. The built-in Poulsbo driver in the latest kernel doesn't display the splash screen. Hopefully, updates to the kernel will eventually solve the problem but at the moment the only good video drivers run under Windows.

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    Replies
    1. Hi Norman, thanks for sharing the information. I'll try booting up Quantal in my Asus Eee PC.

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  10. Yes on the Asus Eee-pc 1101HA Quantal boots up perfectly with everything working that I've tried so far. The only problem is the very, very slow processing performance of the CPU even though I've overclocked it.
    Has anyone found a way to soup up this machine to acceptable levels?

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    Replies
    1. Gnome 3 or Unity will not perform with the limited resources of Asus Eee-pc 1101HA. I am currently using Linux Mint 13 XFCE and quite pleased with it's performance. I guess you can wait either try out Xubuntu 12.10 or wait for the Mint 14 with XFCE. Gnome 3 or KDE 4 sucks on Asus Eee-pc but XFCE works really well.

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  11. I tried 12.10 on the 1101HA yesterday and it was really sluggish. 12.04LTS with this workaround is a lot faster, even with 2GB RAM.

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  12. Hi,

    This is an excellent fix for many people.

    However, when you update the system and if it happens that grub2 gets updated to latest version, this fix will go away, I guess (as the update will recreate the /etc/default/grub file).

    To make the changes permanent, you need to change the same line in the file /etc/grub.d/20_linux_gen.

    Thanks,
    Balaji.

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    Replies
    1. Hi Balaji:

      I am using this fix for quite sometime. Even after grub update to the latest version, it stays and works well. No issue with it.

      However, the Ubuntu developers have fixed this issue with Quantal Quetzal update which is good.

      Regards,
      Arindam

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  13. Thank you,works fine for me

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  14. will this can fix my problem in gigabyte Q2006 netbook too.. help

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