Comment 145 for bug 447892

@Tony White: I am also an i855GM rev02 user and I have experienced that kind of frustration. The workaround for me was to use Xorg 1.6 and its compatible drivers, and if it was hard for me I can barely guess how hard it must have been for less experienced users than us.

Having tried most of the patches around, I can confirm that D.Vetter's patch is much better than the DRM intel big hammer patch; actually the "big hammer" produced a barely usable system (5 minutes at most), while I am now using Xorg 1.7 and the new intel drivers for more than a week with D.Vetter's patch.

I haven't yet tried the latest version of his patch (will do ASAP), but even the first version never crashes unless you play a video, and that might be the separate bug 26723

So thanks to Daniel, and let's help them to make this out! Yes it's a shame that a patch which broke older hardware in favor of new hardware was accepted without a glitch, but I wouldn't blame the people which is now working to fix this :)

I have personally been admitting to newbie linux users that linux was broken for their hardware, and that there was no short-term solution for them (and neither for me) - so perhaps this is changing right now.