How To Install Latest Intel Driver 2.12 On Ubuntu 10.04 (Lucid Lynx)

After a long time waiting the most interesting update of the Intel drivers for linux is now a fact. We can now have this great hardware acceleration for playing h.264 video. Or in other words we now have Hardware acceleration for HD content with our Intel video cards. As an owner of U400-138 with Intel 4500 MHD I have been waiting for this over a year but now I can play 720p without an issue. And so here is how to install this.

First let's add the Xorg-edgers repo.

$ gksudo gedit /etc/apt/sources.list

And add these two lines at the end of the file:

deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/xorg-edgers/ppa/ubuntu lucid main #xorg-edgers PPA
deb-src http://ppa.launchpad.net/xorg-edgers/ppa/ubuntu lucid main #xorg-edgers PPA

After that we need to install everything:

$ sudo apt-key adv --recv-keys --keyserver keyserver.ubuntu.com 8844C542 
$ sudo apt-get update 
$ sudo apt-get dist-upgrade

Now we have installed everything but also we need to install the latest Linux kernel 2.6.35 - we can do this like that:

$ sudo apt-get install linux-image-2.6.35-6-generic linux-headers-2.6.35-6-generic

Now we only have to restart and we have a full working system with the latest Xorg drivers for Intel, latest Kernel and hardware acceleration for h.264. My test system give me smooth play of 720p HD movies now. And it's working really great.