The Intel GMA500 is actually capable of hardware acceleration for HD video, but it requires some tweaking of the linux driver environment
At “Linux-Tipps“, there is a guide to enable VAAPI (Video Acceleration API) for netbooks with the Intel GMA500 graphics chipsets.
Once VAAPI is enabled, Full HD videos can be watched and CPU utilization will only be 30%.
Independent game publisher, Bit Blot, has released their public beta of the linux port of Aquaria.
Originally released commercially for Windows and Mac platforms, this game is now downloadable for “free” to all linux users.
Free full version available for download only until January 2010!
The game, Aquaria, has won some awards and gets praises for its intuitive gameplay and graphics.
More description of the game here.
See video of gameplay below!
Download before 2009 ends to get the free Full version of Aquaria!
Now who says gaming isn’t for linux users?
Thanks for WebUpd8.org [News Source]
PS : If you are having problems with the display resolution resulting in your monitor/LCD not being to support and showing a blank screen, open terminal mode
Press “Ctrl-Alt-F1″ on your keyboard
Login with your username and password and Stop GDM
sudo stop gdm
or
sudo /etc/init.d/gdm stop
Copy the default-1.xml over to the Aquaria settings/preference folder as usersettings.xml [ overwriting the original]
cp ~/aquaria/default-1.xml ~/.Aquaria/preferences/usersettings.xml
Edit the xml file
nano ~/.Aquaria/preferences/usersettings.xmlusersettings.xml
Edit the video section so that full screen mode is disabled, set to 16bits mode, turn off framebuffer and turn resolution to 1024×768.
<ScreenMode resx=”1024″ resy=”768″ bits=”16″ fbuffer=”0″ full=”0″ vsync=”1″ darkfbuffer=”1″ darkbuffersize=”256″ />
Start GDM again
sudo start gdm
or
sudo /etc/init.d/gdm start
This time the game will run in windowed mode. Change the video settings within the game until it works to your desire.
Or you could also manually adjust the parameters within the ~/.Aquaria/preferences/usersettings.xml file
In the past 2 months, there has been much hype over Kernel Mode Settings (KMS) and Rootless X-Server. The inclusion of KMS into kernel version 2.6.29 is one of the major move towards KMS for enabling Rootless X-Server with various graphics hardware.
So what is KMS and Rootless X-Server and why the average linux user should be concerned?
KMS addresses the handling of video hardware which in turn displays the nice graphical user interface to the user. As its name suggests, means the kernel will set up the display’s resolution and depth mode (eg 800×600x32bits).
