<CLOSED> nVidia Driver Issue GeForce 7300LE

[gtsfer]

With the nVidia driver for this card in LMDE Mate 64 I get the screen artifacts shown in the attachment. See the little box at top left corner and there's some at the top center of the screen. Dragging a window around across the top results in multiple boxes appearing and disappearing. I believe this is a problem specific to LMDE and doesn't show up in the main editions at all.

nVidia Driver Artifacts.jpg

Driver version installed with Package Manager is nvidia-legacy-304xx-driver (304.116-2). Everything appears to be set up fine and "inxi" reports the nVidia driver is loaded, GLX is working with direct rendering enabled and all.

I have LMDE Mate 64 on a USB flash so I can experiment with this. I have also tried installing LM17 Mate and Cinnamon on the Flash drive and in these main editions I can load 304.117 with driver manager and there is no issue and no such artifacts at all.

Tried using PPAs but I'm unable to find one with 304.117 except for an xorg-edgers PPA that states "This PPA is currently meant to be used as a whole. Please do _not_ individually install packages from it". So I have the 304.117 driver downloaded and have tried installing it via the "run" file in console mode but have some issues with "FATAL: Module nouveau is in use ". I have tried blacklisting and restarting to no avail. I guess it's initrd/kernel related.

There's much more history to this but I'm keeping the initial post brief. Maybe I've failed at that already. Any tips would be appreciated.

[nomko]

Does Debian still look like that?? It looks like you don't have anti-aliasing turned on...
I remember when i tried Debian that it had to do something with a file called libcairo...... something more which needed to be updated from some external source.

[gtsfer]

Well yes, LMDE Mate does look like that. At the risk of sounding stupid, how do I turn anti-alaising on? Maybe it's in nVidia Settings, have to look and see. Guess I'll have to reboot with the LMDE Flash stick to check it out.

I do have some components of libcairo installed by default apparently. I'll have to investigate this as well. It's interesting that it occurs on LMDE only. The difference in drivers between 304.116 and 304.117 (that get used in both Cinn and Mate main versions) can't be that significant. Thanks!

[Monsta]

Tried using PPAs but I'm unable to find one with 304.117 except for an xorg-edgers PPA that states "This PPA is currently meant to be used as a whole. Please do _not_ individually install packages from it". So I have the 304.117 driver downloaded and have tried installing it via the "run" file in console mode but have some issues with "FATAL: Module nouveau is in use ".

Very bad idea in Debian. PPAs aren't recommended, PPAs with such a critical thing as a video driver aren't recommended even more so.

Add Debian Testing repos and install nvidia-legacy-304xx-driver 304.123.

[gtsfer]

Very bad idea in Debian. PPAs aren't recommended, PPAs with such a critical thing as a video driver aren't recommended even more so.

Thanks, I found that out the hard way more or less. None of the repos I tried did much good anyway, didn't have versions of the driver I wanted to try. I'll give the above a shot for sure, 304.123 should work per what nvidia-detect says.

[gtsfer]

Add Debian Testing repos and install nvidia-legacy-304xx-driver 304.123.

Monsta, forgive my ignorance on this one. Is this the correct way to accomplish this? http://forums.linuxmint.com/viewtopic.p ... 1&t=123323. Specifically in "B - Moving to Testing". Except I'm using /etc/apt/sources.list.d/official-package-repositories.list of course.

[Monsta]

No need to follow these instructions. There's a quicker way (just replace item 3 with the upgrade of the video drivers).

[gtsfer]

The nVidia 304.123 driver appears to be working without glitches, but only after I turned anti-aliasing on. I tried the same with 304.116 and it worked ok for a while, then the same artifacts returned. I'm going to play with this one for a while yet.

I'm also trying to figure out how to get my frame rate as reported by glxgears to something near what the Nouveau driver gave. It's significantly lower with any nVidia driver when I test it, but doesn't seem to be affecting performance so that I notice it at all during use. I guess it's settings in xorg.conf or something else to do with X. Thanks all for getting me this far at least.

[gtsfer]

Well, sometimes it works fine for an entire login session. And sometimes the screen artifacts are there right after boot and login.

As mentioned in my first post, LM17 Mate or Cinnamon 64-bit do not have this issue at all in the main editions. It has to be partially the hardware, but LMDE has something to do with it as well.

Maybe I'll try a kernel upgrade since I'm working with LMDE on a test flash drive with this and have nothing to lose. I'm chalking this one up to experience and marking it CLOSED since it's not really solved.