Feeling intrepid I upgraded to Ubuntu 8.10. So, since I had been using the via chrome drivers my little computer was made very ill. Not even adding xforcevesa to the boot line would get X to start. Just a black screen with a little rectangle of white scribble in the middle.
Anyway, I keep a copy of my oldest working xorg.conf file sitting in /etc/X11 just in case. So a boot into text mode allowed me to replace the broken config with the basic vesa config. All started nicele and, as the LaptopTestingTeam wiki page will tell you it will run with vesa drivers at 16:9 (1280×720) which looks terrible.
What it didn’t tell me (at least not yesterday) was that via have released a beta of the chrome drivers for 8.10. These are 2D only but work very well for that. And you still need to fix the config (use your old via conf file – it is fine). So I do have Intrepid running nicely on the Mini-Note 2133 with decent quality 2D graphics. The nicest improvement so far is much better wireless reliability using WPA. It seems pretty flawless now and getting connected to my home network is much quicker.
Booting seems to take significantly longer than with 8.04. I haven’t timed it but I would guess 30-50% longer for a cold boot. Battery life was woeful and seems to be slightly worse now. Down from about 90 minutes with wireless to about 75 minutes – but I will keep an eye on that.