Kubuntu 8.10, Nvidia GE Force 6200 and my diminishing patience

[Ray Parrish]

Stephen wrote:
> Dear All
>
> I have made some changes to my Dell in order to deal with some 
> resolution issues.  I have added 1 GB of RAM and now the total is 2 GB. 
>   I have replaced the onboard Intel graphics with an NVIDIA GE Force 
> 6200 with 256 MB of onboard RAM.
>
> Installation of the NVIDIA went OK and I installed the driver
> recommended by Ubuntu.  This has allowed me more control over the
> resolution which I have set to: 1280 X 720 @ 55Mhz.
>
> However, I now have an entirety new set of problems.  The current
> symptoms of which are:
> 1) windows slow to render if I move them fast across the desktop
> 2) when too many applications are started the icons and menus become
> colour reversed and blured, with menus and icons becoming distorted and
> squashed.  Open Office Writer on its  own as the only application open 
>   produces this effect.  Other wise it takes FIrefox, Thunderbird and
> Kate to bring about the same effect.
> 3) Sometimes the desktop disappears to blank black screen and a right
> click on the desktop brings it back.
>
> When I turned Desktop Effects back on again (with only three desktop 
> effects ticked) the problem was worse and with less applications open.
>
> Any help appreciated
>
> Stephen
>   
Hello,

That model is real close to my Geforce 6100, except mine is built into 
the motherboard, and I'm only using 64 MiB's of RAM robbed from the 
system RAM. It';s working great in Hardy with all of the eye candy 
options enabled in Compiz, so yours should be capable of the same.

Have a look in your /var/log/xorg.0.log file, and look to see which 
modules are being loaded, and what capabilities and/or possibly error 
messages are being listed in it. I believe that the GLX module is one 
that is required for video acceleration with Nvidia cards.

You'll have to skip down over a couple of sections that specify memory 
ranges utilized that aren't intelligible to anyone but possibly computer 
engineers. Check to see if you are using the "nv" driver, or the newer 
"nvidia" driver, you should be using nvidia, or possibly even 
nvidia-glx. Also look for the following lines - Default visual should be 
Truecolor, and RENDER acceleration as well as GLX should be enabled.

(**) NVIDIA(0): Depth 24, (--) framebuffer bpp 32
(==) NVIDIA(0): RGB weight 888
(==) NVIDIA(0): Default visual is TrueColor
(**) NVIDIA(0): Using gamma correction (1.0, 1.0, 1.0)
(**) NVIDIA(0): Enabling RENDER acceleration
(II) NVIDIA(0): Support for GLX with the Damage and Composite X 
extensions is
(II) NVIDIA(0):     enabled.

In the ( )'s on the start of each line in the log file is you see the 
text WW, that is a warning message about a problem. Mine contains the 
following warning, which prevents me using any other video modes than 
the four in my xorg.conf file at present, as the monitor has to be set 
to a Generic Flat Panel, due to incorrect EDID information being returned.

(WW) NVIDIA(GPU-0): The EDID read for display device CRT-0 is invalid:
(WW) NVIDIA(GPU-0):     unrecognized EDID Header.

The EDID information being returned by your monitor can be extracted 
with the command

get-edid | parse-edid

after installing the package read-edid which contains those two 
programs. The EDID consists of two 128 kiB blocks of information stored 
in the monitor about it's capabilities. If it is being correctly 
extracted by x already it will be in your xorg.0.log file as well.

You can find your video driver version by running Nvidia X Server 
Settings from the System, Administration menu. The driver's version will 
be shown on the right side, if you select "X Server Information" in the 
list on the left side. I'm using 169.12 here and it's running great.

These settings can all be manually set in your /etc/X11/xorg.conf file 
if they are not currently set correctly.

Later, Ray Parrish

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