Today I made the mistake of upgrading my girlfriends LinuxMint on her Dell mini 10. After a new kernel was installed the video went to shit. It uses the Intel GMA500 “Poulsbo” video hardware.
I thought it would improve performance to do the entire upgrade like this one here. However the upgrade just made everything shitty. Soon after the upgrade I attempted to playback a nice big video with mplayer and I got a shitty choppy playback and a shitty black flickering bar towards the lower part of the playback. So, I googled for a few hours only to find a ton of others bitching about this driver and how much Intel sucks for this. After readin about all i could fucking stand about the psb driver, one of my old i810 video tips came to mind. Appending “mem=” to your kernel boot line to specify how much memory the kernel uses, Leaving some for the video system.
In your grub/menu.lst find your kernel line:
kernel /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.31-16-generic root=/dev/sda5 ro quiet splash
Add “mem=SOMETHING LESS THAN YOUR ACTUAL MEMORY”
kernel /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.31-16-generic root=/dev/sda5 ro quiet splash mem=1000mb
Her mini 10 only has a gig of memory so I am using “mem=1000″, thats in Megabytes and there is 1024 of them in a Gig of ram so this should leave me 24MB’s for video.. if it needs it.
Wouldn’t ya know it, It worked. 
Hope this stupid post helps somebody out. Please share your comments.
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WordPress for Android has been released. This of my first post to my blog from my phone. I guess it is working!
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A few years ago I kicked around the idea of a Steamboat Springs Linux Users Group. The domain I purchased for this project has sat quite dormant until just recently, some other Linux users in the Steamboat area have shown some interest. So, here it is.. finally.. The Steamboat Springs Linux Users Group. If you a Steamboat Springs local and a Linux geek also. please visit and create your login.
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Alright, you have a Linux server connected to your television. You don’t want to have to plug a keyboard into it to play movies, right? You most likely have some other computer on the network you would like to launch mplayer from and then have the output to the television. Well thanks to xservers we can take care of this.
Log into your server and create a /usr/local/bin/mplaytv script like this:
#!/bin/bash
DISPLAY=:0.0 mplayer -fs -zoom "$1"
Make sure you make it executable.
chmod 755 /usr/local/bin/mplaytv
Now you can play something with the new script and the output will go to the xserver attached to the TV.
Make sure you run the mplaytv script as the user logged into the xsession on the server, or you will get xsession errors.
mplaytv Some_Video.avi
You should see some activity in your shell and mplayer controls are attached to that shell, So keyboard shortcuts also work remotely.
Linux Media, Done.
Simple ain’t it?
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