Nvidia - scrambled kdm background and login splash

[pschmidtke]

Hi openSuse users,

I have a freshly installed openSuse11.1 64 bit (KDE3.5) using the latest Nvidia 64 bit driver (NVIDIA-Linux-x86_64-180.44-pkg2.run) for my Geforce9800 GTX+. I use dual screening (twinview) mode autodetected by the Nvidia configuration tool, with two different screens and two different resolutions (one Asus VH222 and a Sony 19").
Within the KDE session everything works just fine, no problem.

When I have however the kdm login screen I have only the center containing the username and password fields etc.. (at the login resolution) and around all two screens are filled up with a mess coming from previous kde sessions. When I log in, I have a splash with the same mess, and only afterwards the normal kde session loads correctly.

I had never experienced any problem like this with nvidia drivers. Do you know how to get rid of this graphics scrambling in the login screen?

I also saw, that sax2 does not correctly support dual screening with my configuration, this is why I used the nvidia configuration tool to produce a xorg.conf file.

Thanks in advance.

Peter

[gielhendriks]

Hi Peter,

I experience the same problem. I started a thread on this problem some time ago and clearly more people have the same problem. However, so far I did not find a solution for this.

[pschmidtke]

did you try to use an older nvidia graphics driver?

I did not for now, as this is my computer at work and now everything is stable, so I do not want to experience around I just know that I do not have the same problem on a Suse 10.3 with an older nvidia driver and a geforce8800GT.

Bit strange.

Furthermore, this problem does not appear on Ubuntu, with exactly the same machine and the same version of the NVIDIA driver.

[gielhendriks]

The problem started with the 180.x driver series. But the older drivers have a very poor performance in kde4 so downgrading is not really an option.

[pschmidtke]

So you think that this is purely Nvidia related?

as I use KDE3.5 and not the 4, this should be alright no? When you say poor performance, you mean poor 3D acceleration etc for the graphics card you actually have?

[heinrich773]

I'm not sure of the cause, but one solution for the scrambled graphics I found is to change the KDM Theme from SUSE to something else, like Oxygen. I've had to do this in /etc/sysconifig Editor under Desktop, then Display Manager, then DISPLAYMANAGER_KDM_THEME.

I also change it in System Settings, Login Manager GUI style, as this value doesn't change the KDM_THEME setting. I've tried Oxygen and Bespin and both eliminate the garbled textures from the login screen.

[pschmidtke]

great,this works...now I just have to find a nice theme

thanks for your help

[heinrich773]

I may have found the problem, at least on my system. All the themes that do NOT garble the login screen have a "background=true" statement in the XML file. The SUSE does not. So, I went to

/usr/share/kde4/apps/kdm/themes

Opened the SUSE directory, then opened suse.xml.

In the second line after the <greeter> statement, I added

background="true" after the ID, so it looks like:

<item type="pixmap" id="background" background="true">

That fixed it, so that there are no garbled texture artifacts, and the background fills both monitors on my setup.

So far, this has been working after several logouts and reboots.

I'm not a programmer, I don't write code, so I don't know if this is advisable, but it's working for me.

Cheers!

[acflip]

Thank you! Adding background="true" to the suse.xml file worked for me and eliminated the problem.

[Knurpht]

Found a workaround for this problem months ago: install kdebase3-kdm, and replace kdm4 as windowmanager by kdm (in /etc/sysconfig/displaymanager).