The OS we use in our appliances is based on Debian. We switched from ubuntu to debian mainly for it’s stability.

The ubuntu rapid changes are sometimes not good for the stability and released to soon, resulting in Black Screen of Dead (BOD) for example for a lot of intel graphic card users after the update from ubuntu 9.10 to 10.04. Video in pygame for example is very unstable with ubuntu; almost stable with the last debian testing.

So we switched to Debian Squeeze (testing) a while ago. And so far we have a clean, small and fast OS, with some nice boot splash artwork. We can rapidly clone it to all kinds of hardware starting with a 8Gb clonezilla image.

On some older intel graphic cards we ran into trouble; BOD’s when switching to fullscreen in SDL apps, weird artefact’s when moving the mouse, couple of xServer crashes when playing fullscreen youtube video etc.

It only happended on: Intel Corporation 82945G/GZ Integrated Graphics Controller (rev 02) and Intel Corporation 82852/855GM Integrated Graphics Device (rev 02).

It took a while to discover where the problems originated from. On some forums if found descriptions of the same problem, and they seemed to be solved in the last releases. So i edited the sources.list file and did a apt-get dist-upgrade to get in sync with the latest debian unstable. I removed the xorg.conf files to start fresh and had working GDM, with hardware acceleration. I tested it for some weeks now and didn’t have one single crash. We tested it with; SDL fullscreen switching with a couple of games, openGL cairo dock, playing youtube HD videos in fullscreen firefox for a couple of hours. The only thing which still crashes are videos in pygame (nothing new there...).

I just found a possible solution for our crashing video problem also, from the pygame site: