I discovered afterwards that I kept having random lockups with massive screen garbage then my 2D acceleration on the desktop would be disabled (even moving application windows would be painfully slow) along with playing videos in any kind of multimedia player such as VLC or SMPlayer (frontend for mplayer) would not work at all. After doing some more digging on this machine I find what kind of integrated gpu this machine has.
*Note this may be a bit of explanations and code posting so bear with me*
Code: Select all
lspci -v | grep -i vga
00:02.0 VGA compatible controller: Intel Corporation 82845G/GL[Brookdale-G]/GE Chipset Integrated Graphics Device (rev 01) (prog-if 00 [VGA controller])
Code: Select all
ppa:glasen/intel-driver
ppa:oibaf/graphics-drivers
Code: Select all
Section "Device"
Identifier "Card0"
Driver "intel"
Option "Shadow" "true"
Option "DRI" "false"
BoardName "Intel Corporation 82845G/GL[Brookdale-G]/GE Chipset Integrated Graphics Device (rev 01)"
BusID "PCI:0:2:0"
EndSection
Rebooted to find that the X11 crashed quite wonderfully and that apparantly the intel driver ignores turning off modeset with "0". I ended up blacklisting the whole bloody mess of the i915 driver in "/etc/modprobe.d/blacklist.conf" and rebooted forcing Mint to use VESA or at least some sort of generic graphics driver. It works and at least it's more acceleration then the intel driver turning off the gpu. How did I know besides screen garbage I lost my 2D acceleration but not 3D opengl support? Easy... using
Code: Select all
grep 'WW\|EE' /var/log/Xorg.0.log
would reveal crap like
925.964] (EE) intel(0): Detected a hung GPU, disabling acceleration.
[ 925.964] (EE) intel(0): When reporting this, please include i915_error_stat
And a variation would also sometimes be the GPU was wedged and hung as well
What really is interesting too is if you look at https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=26345 there is apparantly already backport fixes for Debian Wheezy that solve the hardware issue with Intel 845g chipsets with the i915 driver but there will likely be a frosty chance in heck those backports will ever make it to Ubuntu for awhile at least *fingers crossed* unless there's some way to actually use debian wheezy backports with Mint without compromising my system bigtime.
Forgot to add a blog at http://prahladyeri.wordpress.com/2012/0 ... rds-issue/ mentioned the VESA idea I tried along with using two different acceleration methods with the intel driver none of which helped. And he too mentions those backports from Debian fixing it... (/facepalm)