KDE 4.1 "Advanced Settings" from shell / OpenGL glitches

[iloveads47]

Hi!

I hope this is the right forum to post on. Recently installed / configured openSUSE 11.1 (newb) and even managed to get wireless working on my unsupported Broadcom with ndiswrapper, so I was feeling quite proud of myself; however:

Compositing and other OpenGl applications seemed glitchy and with corruption/flickering so I decided to look at "Advanced Settings" in the Desktop Appearance Wizard and changed a setting of the path for OpenGL compositing. Since then I am stuck in terminal.




Therefore:

Q1) Is there a way to restore my original OpenGl, etc. I already tried erasing the KDE folder, and that didn't work so hot. Oh, btw unless I hand it runlevel 3 at boot I get nothing but a beautiful blank screen.

Q2) (less critical) Anybody know why my graphics could be glitching out? I have the proprietary driver, etc., and what can I do in order to have a nice looking desktop with compositing enabled

Really hate to have to re-install again (already had stuff sort of set up/updated/etc.)

My video is an onboard Ati Radeon x1250

My Computer is an Acer Extensa 4420-5237

(i can give more detailed configuration if it will help)

Any help/suggestions/newb-appropriate advice are appreciated!

[caf4926]

Booting to level 3 as user then go su and type

yast

will start a basic Yast. Here you could create a new user and make sure auto-login is disabled too.
That should get you back to some kind of login.

Alternatively, you can boot a live cd and edit the config files or try the delete of .kde and or .kde4

As for ATI. All I seems to read on this is horror stories. Never had and never will have ATI

[iloveads47]

Hi caf,

Thanks for the tip. It's a good one. From the minimal yast menu I was able to disable "3d acceleration" inside Hardware > Monitor and Desktop, which restored my GUI. Yay!

Incidentally this also got rid of the graphical glitches/corruption, so compositing seems to be working (albeit in software; and I didn't see any glitches in opengl apps).

However now the desktop feels quite a bit slower / choppier than it does without compositing effects are not operating.

Therefore:

Does anyone have some advise about diagnosing / indentifying the source of the problem of my Opengl / Firegl / driver system so that I can use hardware-acceleration to composit stuff? General tutorials are great as well

So yeah, thanks a bunch caf, the immediate problem is solved. I will keep in mind about ATI, but changing PC's is not planned for at least a year or two, and I am motivated to have Linux run on what I have.

[caf4926]

Looking for the driver at ATI, this is what it came up with (This is 32bit not _64): ATI Catalystâ„¢ Proprietary Display Driver

The above is a manual install. See tha last part of this page for install info: ATI Installer HOWTO for SUSE/Novell users
===============================================

This is the ATI suse page

ATI - openSUSE

[iloveads47]

I'll try doing the manual install and see if it fixes stuff. It seems you are right and a lot of people have different difficulties with ATI though. That sucks! Which I knew that when I was looking for a computer.