Well I found a short cut. Got tired of the errors and will leave it for another day.

The GPU is Mali400, and once again, posting the info I saw at the bottom of the page links to driver information. Too tired to look at them at the moment.

I found another Debian Wheezy image with Mate desktop and graphics acceleration. The video resizes as it should, and cpu usage is under 30% in full screen mode, at least for my movies which are not HD quality. Just where I was trying to get to. Applied all your input for updating the distribution, and I'm back at 7.7, with working video.

Had to install mplayer myself, and the controls are not working quite right, but the important stuff is fine. The image is just under 2Gig, running off SD card at the moment.

I'll continue with my hopeless pursuits next weekend . Done for now. Here is the sources.list it came with:

Strange sources.list for a clean install.

Most people clean out, I think, the repos for the previous version. Must have been upgraded at some time, maybe using a Wheezy install disk to upgrade with.

Someone edited out all but the one src repos. Debian would have those all present and enabled. So you could remove all those commented lines if you want to save a byte or so.

They don't hurt a thing except maybe readability. I just like looking at different sources.lists and wondering how they got that way.

I have to admit wondering why your video works better. Is it something from the "deb http://repo.ajenti.org/debian main main debian" repo or from the wheezy-backports repo?

Could be that a backported kernel has better support for that controller. Could be what ever this ajenti stuff is.

Hi widget, had everything set up just perfect, and was even getting to like the Mate desktop, then... Rebooted the system and it just gets stuck at the boot screen. This was highly annoying after 5 days work. Came to the conclusion that it's probably not a good idea to install an image from some unknown source. Maybe it was the upgrade to wheezy 7.7 that broke it. Originally it was also wheezy, just a lower version.

Fortunately this new install was working from an sd card, and my last Debian version was still in nand memory. So I am back to my old setup (where the video doesn't resize), but appreciating it much more. It's reliable and robust.

Last night (didn't wait for the weekend) I experimented with moving the video drivers from the sd card image (Mate desktop and able to resize video) to the current image. Now all the drivers show up when you run 'lsmod', relationships between which drivers are being used by other drivers is correct. The only difference is that driver 'mali_drm' is not being used:
Shouldn't really even post this publicly. One day I'll be looking back wondering "How in heck did you ever expect this to work!". The disciplined approach would be to get and read the book 'Linux from scratch'. That's what I will do.

Also getting along well with learning how to compile from source. Though 'well' might be an overstatement, I got much further. I am getting an error about C compiler not being able to make executables, but will figure it out.

I looked up 'ajenti' but didn't go further than not seeing the relevance. Was possibly looking at the wrong site, so I need to look again.

Confusing part at the moment is that some drivers are built into the kernel, and those don't show up when running 'lsmod'. There's a command to list all the kernel drivers:
but not sure what the command is, if there is one, to see all loaded modules wherever they were started from.

Must get on with some real work now. Linux is so addicting, it's going to get me into trouble!

The upgrade to 7.7 refers to the 7th new install image for Debian 7 since Wheezy was released. If you check /etc/debian_version on any up to date it will read 7.7.

Mine does. It started out as testing. Went to 7.0.

Once the release is made most of your package upgrades come out of the http://security.debian.org repo. Generally just security patches. Shouldn't break the system.

Mate is not bad at all. Nice fork of Gnome 2. Wife uses it on her laptop under Wheezy. Loves it.

I ran Gnome 2. Like the panel system pretty well. Just think that the Xfce panel is what the Gnome panel always wanted to grow up to be.

Caja, the fork of Nautilus used by Mate, beats Nautilus as it is today all hollow as far as I am concerned. Like it a bit better than Thunar of the version used in Xfce 4.8 used in Wheezy because of the tabbed browsing.

My Wheezy install on here and the wifes Wheezy both started out as testing. Xfce was, just a little bit before Wheezy went into freeze, at version 4.10 (4.9 and all odd numbered Xfce versions are the development version). There was a problem with the panel and so Debian reverted testing to 4.8. This was alright but Thunar with 4.10 has tabbed browsing.

Xfce 4.10 was dropped out of testing and Sid repos and put in experimental. I just installed Thunar from there on my Wheezy. So it is running a bit different Thunar than most peoples Wheezy is now.

Have you looked to see if anyone is using Debian testing on that board? Could be the much newer kernel (3.16) supports the board better driver wise. Jessie is in freeze so it is pretty stable. Ubuntu 14.04 is based on it.

Have you looked at the debian-kernel-handbook package? That covers kernel compiling well.

Linux is adictive. It shocked me when I installed it. The power you have over the system is fantastic. I reinstalled 5 times the first 7 days. That 5th time I reinstalled and then did another install of the same system (Ubuntu 8.04) and never broke the "real" install again. Actually still using the /home from that still. Wheezy and Squeeze share that /home partition now (tom and thom).