How to install Intel 82852/855GM driver?

Solution 1:

I have also struggled with Toshiba laptops and the 855GM chipset. I've been able to overcome this with the following PPA. This will provide an updated version of xserver-xorg-video-intel that may provide better results than what you currently have.

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:glasen/intel-driver
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get upgrade

If you don't receive updates to the xserver-xorg-video-intel then run

sudo apt-get install xserver-xorg-video-intel

More information regarding PPAs and How to use them

Solution 2:

The Intel i855 (along with the i830 and i845) chips have suffered serious stability regressions since the implementation of DRI2 (and the associated GEM kernel work) in the driver. These features have stressed parts of the hardware that haven't previously been heavily used in the past, and turn out to have hardware bugs.

Thus, in Ubuntu 10.04 we turned off KMS for these cards. That didn't help enough, and many users still reported frequent system crashes - from X just not coming up, to the system hanging whenever they tried to play a video, to apparently random freezes every couple of days.

In Maverick we've just disabled the autoloader for the Intel driver on these cards. That should give a baseline stable experience for users of these cards, dropping back to fbdev.

See this page for details of how to use the Intel driver (and possibly sacrifice stability).

Update: The Intel driver will be autoloaded in the upcoming Ubuntu 11.10 release, as upstream has (apparently!) worked around the issues that this hardware has.