Intel Sandy Bridge graphics on Debian Squeeze

[Hallvor]

I recently set up a laptop with the Intel HD 3000 (Sandy Bridge) graphics, and I'll post this for future reference or if anyone wants a little hand holding. After these steps I was able to play Nexuiz on high graphics settings at a decent FPS, and I didn't even install Wheezy or Sid...

The following was tested on an Asus X54C notebook, where I installed the kernel, mesa and xorg from backports. Maybe there is another way, but this is how I did it and it worked very well.

Add backports to sources.list:

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echo "deb http://backports.debian.org/debian-backports squeeze-backports main" >> /etc/apt/sources.list

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aptitude update

(Read further instructions on backports here)
http://backports-master.debian.org/Instructions/

Install the latest kernel (assuming 64 bit):

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aptitude -t squeeze-backports install linux-image-3.2.0-0.bpo.2-amd64

Boot into the new kernel and:

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aptitude -t squeeze-backports install linux-headers-$(uname -r)

Install xorg and mesa. This should work if you have an Intel HD 3000:

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aptitude install -t squeeze-backports xorg xserver-xorg xserver-xorg-core xserver-xorg-input-synaptics xserver-xorg-video-intel libgl1-mesa-dri libgl1-mesa-glx

Alternatively, you could install the metapackage xserver-xorg-video-all instead of xserver-xorg-video-intel, and it will pull in a lot of other packages.