On 05/12/2010 08:08 AM, Mark Allums wrote:
On 5/12/2010 6:49 AM, Snood wrote:I'm looking forward to seeing if nouveau will be an improvement, performance-wise, without causing reliability issues. I am, however, going to wait and install nouveau the easy way, once the upgrade to xserver-xorg-core becomes available in the repository. If this weren't my main system I might be tempted to experiment, but I just need this thing to keep working.People running non-stable (even squeeze) are going to run into problems now and then. It's an unavoidable certainty. nouveau is, well, new. There are going to be problems with it.
Of course. But the problems I had with Gnome and Xfce on this system occurred not only in Squeeze, but also when running an Ubuntu LTS version and Debian Stable. I only saw those problems when using the restricted / glx drivers. Never with nv or vesa. I think this is, perhaps, more a measure of the card itself than the drivers. But I know a number of people with "high end" graphics cards from nvidia who have reported the same sorts of issues that I saw. It doesn't really matter much as these particular systems are no longer used as graphics workstations. As they've aged we stuck Linux on them and use them as admin workhorses, a job for which they are admirably suited because of all of the screen real estate.
Regarding reliability of video drivers: Running many different things, hardware- and driver-wise, over time, I have learned that dpkg-reconfigure is your friend, especially dpkg-reconfigure linux-image-2.6.32-5 which regenerates the initrd.img. (I needed this recently. Substitute the package name of your kernel.) Occasionally very helpful, that, when troubleshooting drivers.
Yes. In my earlier experiences I would just wipe the drive and start over when I suspected that hangovers from previous experiments with drivers were getting in the way of new configurations. But after I became comfortable with a few different methods of installation and initial configuration I started paying attention to things like dpkg-reconfigure and debconf-show.