Installing Intel 815/852/855 graphics controller drivers on Ubuntu / Debian

If you are new to Ubuntu it may happen that devices won’t work. That’s new, for Windows users. Microsoft Windows is an universal Operating System. That’s why hardware manufacturers have developers working for them to write the drivers. But it doesn’t means those drivers also end up in Linux!. There are various reasons for that:- Linux isn’t being recognized as a grown-up Operating System by certain companies and manufacturers.- Propriety still plays a big role. By default hardware manufacturers are not keen on releasing their product specifications.- Not enough developers in the community to write a driver which sometimes can be complex.These are the most important reasons why driver support sometimes fails under Linux. Also I had to live with that until today. I finally got the puzzle solved in my case.The Intel onboard graphics such as the 810/852/855 family haven’t always been working properly under GNU/Linux distributions. The first stage was a simple driver which made it possible to use your portable with a maximum resolution of 1280×1024. After a while 8xxresolution came into the repositories. With this CLI-application (Command Line Interface) it was possible to configure a pre-made script to use the real maximum resolution your portable and onboard chip supported. In my case that is 1400×1050.As I said before on this blog I’m a beginner myself in many factors and forms. My only advantage compared with an Absolute Beginner is the fact I’ve have been using GNU/Linux distributions since 1999. While writing an other article for my blog (about the happiness of Debra and Ian) I’ve came across an interesting piece! I knew that the Intel 855 drivers where bundled with the drivers for the 810 and 915 chipset drivers but the whole problem was they were only available in .rpm. The Wiki article stated that ‘Alien’ (a small application) is able to create .deb files out of .rpm and other archives. That was exactly what I needed!I did the following terminal work to to install the drivers with enabled hardware acceleration :

• sudo apt-get install alien

In the meantime I downloaded the driver and browsed in the terminal to the location it would be downloaded to. After the download was complete I used the following commands.

• sudo alien <filname.rpm>
• sudo dpkg -i <filename.deb>
• sudo apt-get update
• sudo apt-get upgrade

If, in your case you still can’t switch to the maximum resolution you should install 915resolution from the repositories. Please note that you might have to enable the multiverse / universe repositories to download and install this application. 915resolution works exactly like 855resolution, only it supports more (new) Intel onboard chipsets. But even without the maximum resolution your onboard chip should now be as fast as under Windows again. I installed and played Planet Penguin Racer to test the graphics card. It worked as it should even configured at a resolution of 1400×1050 or 1280×1024.

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