Ubuntu 12.04: Compiz Segfault

[Lucio M Nicolosi]

On Mon, Apr 30, 2012 at 6:49 PM, Lawrence Houston
<ubuntu at greenfield.dyndns.org> wrote:
>
> I may have to take back my previous posting, since I agree with Lucio that
> with NVidia's Proprietary Driver removed, compiz runs without Segfaults and
> I see no signs of unity-2d-panel or unity-2d-shell running.  That said I am
> not sure whether Unity is actually running in its 3D Mode???  I also tried a
> "Clean" Installation of Ubuntu 12.04, where NVidia's Proprietary Driver was
> pre-installed and therefore had to be removed before selecting "Ubuntu" at
> the Login Screen would give a "Workable" Console...
>
> NOTE: Following the removal of NVidia's Proprietary Driver, the screen
>      display itself returned to what I consider to be "Normal"
>      (Full-Screen, ie. no frame around the desktop and without an
>      annoying "Flicker", indication of a poor choice of Refresh Rate)...
>
> Lawrence Houston  --  (ubuntu at greenfield.dyndns.org)

L.

Tested 12.04 64 (clean install) with 3 different machines and got
different experiences.

My personal machine is running as flawless a Beta may run (I decided
now onwards to consider all Ubuntu's new releases as "Beta"). Had only
one Compiz crash while running OpenJava. The most recent NVidia driver
is running ("old" 8400 video card) and it doesn't seem I'll have to
return to Oneiric, (well kept in another partition, just in case...).

As reported, Compiz plus Unity 3D crashed on a newer MB with NVidia
onboard (7 thousand and something) but the Nouveau drive is running
nicely.

In an older station, install crashed repeatedly even before disk
partition with the Live CD, but Alternate did its job, although a bug
In Language Settings kept the user on Oneiric.

Since your NVidia Card is a 6000 series I believe Compiz (and NVidia)
didn't like it and you're probably running the nice Nouveau display
driver in 3D (just like my just assembled desktop):

"This driver for the X.Org X server (see xserver-xorg for a further description)
provides support for NVIDIA Riva, TNT, GeForce, and Quadro cards.
This package provides 2D support including EXA acceleration, Xv and
RandR.  3D functionality is provided by the libgl1-mesa-dri package.
This package is built from the FreeDesktop.org xf86-video-nouveau driver."

Being a Beta (as I explained before) contrary to Canonical advice, one
should never upgrade. Although a clean install is time consuming since
you have to reinstall all your usual stuff, this keeps your working
release safe in another partition, with its own /home (also in another
partition - you can rsync selected stuff between old and new home if
needed) so you can change your mind whenever you wish. After Beta is
no more, some six months after release, on a rainy weekend, if you
don't have anything more interesting to do, you can try to upgrade
just for fun, it will take hours, but then your clean install will be
running safe and sound.

L.

-- 
Lucio M. Nicolosi, Eng.
Open Source Implementation
System and Applications
GNU/Linux