[NCLUG] Ubuntu Video Issues

Brian Wood bwood at beww.org
Wed Jan 6 16:59:30 MST 2010


On Wednesday 06 January 2010 04:29:19 pm Myles Bostwick wrote:
> Hi All! Long time lurker, first time poster here.
> 
> I'm running Ubuntu 9.10 though I had this problem with Hardy as well.
> After a varied amount of time, my video memory gets corrupted. The
> background, windows and window edges are all colored lines. If I
> minimize, then restore a window, the window redraws, but the border is
> still color bars. However, if I then maximize the window, the border
> redraws as well, but sometimes that causes another window to go all
> color bars.
> 
> Some Information:
> - I'm running the Nvidia Proprietary driver version 185 [Recommended]
> - Gnome version 2.28.1
> - Compiz 0.8.4 (if not enabled, the problem seems to go away, though
> may just take longer to happen)
> - My video card is an nvidia Quardro FX 550 rev a2
> 
> I can attach a screen shot/Xconfig if it's helpful, but I didn't want
> to blast the list with it right away.
> 
> Another, possibly unrelated symptom is that lots of harddrive access
> seems to slow the system down a lot. Ie, I'm doing a large svn
> checkout and all my apps freeze and then come back regularly.

The 185 drivers are known to be problematic, at least that's what the folks on 
the MythTV mailing list say, though this may be mainly related to using VDPAU 
for video decoding.

There are now 190 series drivers, but I don't think they are yet integrated 
into the Ubuntu 'Hardware Drivers" system. The folks who are using them are 
getting them from third-party repositories, or installing using the nVidia-
supplied script. Everyone using them seems to be very happy, and most of the 
complaints have stopped.

I'm not sure how messy converting from the Ubuntu system to some other method 
of driver installation might be, I can't accept responsibility for problems in 
that area.

I'm using the 185 drivers on a 9.10 system with no problems at all, though I 
don't use Compiz, and my video card is a GeForce 8200. The Quadro cards are a 
very different animal from the GeForce units.

You might do a search for "JYA repository", or try using nVidia's script.

You may prefer to wait until Ubuntu catches up with the latest drivers from 
nVidia. You might also want to try reverting to the 180 drivers, they seemed 
to cause fewer problems than the 185 series.



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