Intel 82845 graphics troubles

[iain_j]

I've recently upgraded my laptop to Mint 14 KDE, and after it working so well out of the box (I had troubles with Mint 13), I decided to fix my dad's ageing Windows XP machine with Linux. The PC has Intel 82845 graphics. It didn't go so smoothly.

Firstly, mintupdate doesn't work. The sys tray icon shows updates when it should, but when I click on it, it asks for the password; after entering this the update window very briefly opens then disappears, taking the sys tray icon with it. I've tried running mintupdate from the terminal, it goes through the same process and ends with an IO error 11 from Xorg (can't quite remember the wording of it just now) which makes me think it's graphics-related. I've got round this problem because sudo apt-get update / upgrade work fine.

Secondly, the main concern, is the screen display gets corrupted from time to time - by itself, the screen will go "fuzzy" for a couple of seconds, and then go back to normal. I thought it may be occurring when the screen dims after a few seconds inactivity so I disabled that, but it still happens. Also, at times when the screen would darken, the screen goes black instead - eg. when clicking on shutdown, I get the confirmation dialog on an otherwise black screen instead of the darkened desktop.

Also the transitions on the KDE slideshow screensaver are diabolically slow, but it's fine with the transitions disabled.

I added the xorg-edgers repository and updated; this didn't appear to solve anything so I removed it and added glasen/intel-drivers instead. This sped up the graphics (window-dragging was slow before) but didn't fix the above issues.

Any advice on where to go, what to try next?

[AlbertP]

Drivers for old Intel hardware are not maintained very well anymore, especially the 800 series.

For mintupdate, it's not related to your graphics driver, rather something internal to the X server. IO error 11 for example occurs if you have a program trying to access a window that has already been closed. It's usually a bug in the program. You could try to use Synaptic Package Manager to see if there is an update to the mintupdate package available.

[iain_j]

Thanks Albert, I feared it might be just down to age, he's had the computer about 10 years and I think it was second hand! Hardware upgrades aren't really feasible, money-wise, as the whole system needs upgrading.

Not to worry, I've got round the mintupdate issue by creating a launcher which runs apt-get update & upgrade. Other graphics hiccups we can live with, everything else seems to be working

[AlbertP]

Sometimes you can get a GeForce 6200 or Radeon 9250 card for €10 second-hand, which would be a nice upgrade for this system making simple graphics working OK (provided the system has an AGP slot inside).

[iain_j]

I thought I'd be able to go down that route - I've got a spare AGP card in my old PC - but this one doesn't have AGP, which surprised me, all it has is a few PCI slots. Would it be worth looking for an old PCI graphics card?

[AlbertP]

Currently Zotac is selling a GeForce GT 610 PCI for about €60 available in some webshops, but I understand you're on a tight budget and would prefer a second-hand card instead.

Some manufacturers (most notably Sparkle) have made GeForce 8000 or 9000 series PCI cards in the past, and the slightly older GeForce 6200 has also been sold on PCI cards. It would be nice if you could get a 8400GS PCI, or another 8000/9000 series card, but the 6200 is also certainly a good option.

Be careful not to buy a PCIe (PCI Express) card. That's a newer bus, successor to AGP and PCI in modern computers. Most graphics cards sold of the 8000 series and later are for PCI Express, only a few cards are for PCI slots. And the same manufacturers who have PCI cards, also sell PCI Express ones.

On this Wikipedia image, conventional PCI (which is in your computer) is at the bottom, the 2nd and 4th slot are PCI Express: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/ ... xpress.jpg
You can compare cards sold on the web with that image to see if they're PCI or PCI Express.

[iain_j]

That's a surprise, I didn't realise you could still buy PCI graphics cards! 60 euros is about the max of my budget for this (or £50 in my case); it was just that I thought a hardware upgrade would inevitably mean a new motherboard which would inevitably mean new CPU, RAM, HDD, etc...

I've had a quick search on amazon.co.uk and they have some ATI Radeons, 7500 & 9000, for £25 to £30, do these tend to cooperate with Linux?

[AlbertP]

Radeon 7500 is an old card and not supported that well, but a 9000 is fine (if it is a PCI card, they're usually AGP).

[iain_j]

I've checked the picture of the 9000 (here) against the motherboard and it does look to be plain PCI, so I've ordered it.

Thanks so much for your help!

EDIT to say no I've not... did a last minute google check and discovered many people have had trouble getting Linux working on it...

[AlbertP]

Those problems are about people trying to install a driver (which you can't anymore on such an old card). For basic desktop usage like you are doing, it's fine to run the card without driver; most 9000's work OK that way.

[iain_j]

Ok, I'll order the card tonight. Will it be a case of install the card, switch on and Linux will pick it up and do what it needs, or will I need to do some configuring (not counting disabling the motherboard's onboard graphics - I can manage that)?

EDIT to say I've just read the sticky ATI radeon thread - after installing the card I take it Linux will install the open source driver, and if there's a proprietary driver it'll be in the Additional Drivers box, waiting to be activated?

[AlbertP]

It should just work right away indeed.

[iain_j]

Right, you've convinced me, I've ordered it

Thanks for your help!

[iain_j]

Update: it didn't go smoothly

The Radeon 9000 card arrived this week so went to my dad's today to fit it. Since installing Mint on his PC, the screen has only gone corrupted a handful of times, only for a couple of seconds at a time, usually not long after boot-up. Everything else (other than mintupdate) has been fine. Nevertheless I opened up the case, fitted the card, changed the BIOS setting and booted up.

However it wouldn't get past the POST. It's an emachines PC -- the "e" logo showed, as always on power-on, but after it disappeared, nothing else happened: after a few seconds the monitor showed "No Signal" and then nothing else happened. I powered off by holding the power button down and tried again, and this time got the GRUB menu. I chose advanced options > recovery mode, and this time it started up, right the way up to a working desktop, albeit with a slow and flickery mouse pointer. Subsequent shutdowns and restarts were the same - booting would result in nothing at all, hard-powering off and trying again would let me start in recovery mode. I figured the open source driver wasn't handling it so tried the Additional Drivers program; this reported there were no proprietary drivers.

So I shut down and took the new card out and re-enabled the integrated graphics, and it worked as it used to. Strangely though I noticed some of the fading screen effects - like the screen darkening behind the shutdown confirmation box - were now working where they didn't before. So I'll monitor how it's running back on the Intel graphics. If I press on and try to get the ATI card working I'll start a new thread here.