Linux on a Packard Bell ZA8 Netbook

This smart little notebook is a Packard Bell ZA8. With its AMD L110 1.2Ghz processor and 2GB RAM is should be an ideal candidate for use with a moderately lightweight Linux installation. Well that's what my pal Sergei thought.

However the reality was that as soon as he installed Linux on it he noticed massive image corruption on the screen which made it completely unusable. So, since his time is valuable, and mine not-so-much he handed it over to me with a "you get it to work, you keep it". Challenge accepted!

It didn't take much googling (or thinking) to find that the problem lies with the drivers for the ATI RS690M Graphics Controller. The story, so far as I can understand it, is that ATI stopped releasing Linux drivers for this model in 2009 and has never released a full specification for the cards. Modern versions of Linux come with an open source driver, but as ATI haven't released specs, this is badly broken. Try to run with any resolution over 1024x768 and you're screwed, because the video-ram gets corrupted.

Well I admit this was a headscratcher and I followed a lot of false leads, up to and including hacking into the driver to try to disable the video ram. None of it helped, but eventually I found (with some help from Google, of course) an absurdly simple solution - simply set the video-ram down to 64MB in the kernel boot parameters. And so all that was left was to to remember how the hell to configure GRUB 2 (I miss the old GRUB).

For anyone else who might have forgotten, GRUB is now configured by editing the file /etc/default/grub. Mine now looks like

# If you change this file, run 'update-grub' afterwards to update
# /boot/grub/grub.cfg.
# For full documentation of the options in this file, see:
#   info -f grub -n 'Simple configuration'

GRUB_DEFAULT=0
GRUB_HIDDEN_TIMEOUT=0
GRUB_HIDDEN_TIMEOUT_QUIET=true
GRUB_TIMEOUT=10
GRUB_DISTRIBUTOR=`lsb_release -i -s 2> /dev/null || echo Debian`
GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="quiet splash radeon.vramlimit=64"
GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX=""

Note the "vramlimit"! Now the only thing left to do was follow the instructions at the top of the file and run update-grub, and I was the happy owner of a functioning Linux netbook. Now should I tell Sergei?