How to update an intel video driver?

English Hardware
1

Hi,

I’m trying to use krita, (a painting application) but I’m having problems with it. I asked and searched, and it may be because the video driver is broken. So I’m wondering if there is a way to test the driver or update it individually, because everything works fine, it is just this application in particular. So far I got that intel drivers come with the kernel. Updating the whole kernel is the only way?

Here I left my driver info:

sudo lspci -nnk | grep -A3 VGA
00:02.0 VGA compatible controller [0300]: Intel Corporation Mobile 4 Series Chipset Integrated Graphics Controller [8086:2a42] (rev 07)
        Subsystem: Hewlett-Packard Company Device [103c:30f7]
        Kernel driver in use: i915
        Kernel modules: i915

If I got it all mixed up, please have me patience, I’m new to this.
Thanks for reading. I’d appreciate any clarification.

2

Without further output or info, I don’t think it’s the intel driver since everything else works normal

3

Your Cantiga graphics is about 10 years old. There would almost certainly have been no graphics driver changes applicable to it since long ago.

There is not one single graphics driver for Intel GFX. The kernel contains a low level graphics driver that either works or doesn’t, but certainly should on yours.

For X there are two competent graphics drivers. One is provided by the xf86-video-intel rpm, called “intel”. The other is provided integral to the xserver, called “modesetting”. You can specify which of these two using either /etc/X11/xorg.conf.d/50-device.conf, or by whether or not xf86-video-intel is installed. If installed and not explicitly overridden, it will be used. If not, then unless explicitly denied, modesetting will be used.

The xf86-video-intel driver has no had an upstream official release in over three years. Most intel gfx development time goes into the modesetting driver. For Leap, there are no other suitably tested and supported intel gfx drivers than those I’ve described here, unless your laptop has Optimus (dual GPUs), in which case special Bumblebee drivers are needed, but your lspci output shows no such indication.

All competent Intel video drivers are disabled if the kernel cmdline includes the nomodeset parameter.

4

Thanks for the replies. Things are more clear now.
Since my hardware is really old, and I already have in use its latest driver, I decided to stop here.
Do I need to close this thread? if so how can I do it?

5

If you have never tried the modesetting driver, I suggest you give it a go. Simply uninstalling xf86-video-intel and restarting X or rebooting would do it. Or you can use /etc/X11/xorg.conf.d/50-device.conf to specify use of modesetting.