I had many trouble with my system the past two months. I thought i finally had it running flawless as i encountered another major issue: My Screen doesn’t refresh properly (using GNOME). I have blank windows or windows showing old content which only gets updated when i minimize the window or move the mouse over them. And even then only small parts get really refreshed. Every Application on my desktop seems to suffer from that bug.
I have a GeForce GT240 graphics card running the latest proprietary driver from NVIDIA’s opensuse repo and a x86-64 system. The problem came up when i moved from the update-test repository to the normal update repo. (I had to use the the kernel from test as it solved another problem and accidentally installed all test packages). I readded the test repo and installed all updates back. I even reinstalled half the system (everything that has something to do with gui/graphics). Nothing works.
Does anyone have a clue or the same problem?
Couple of questions:
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Does it matter what window manager you are using? If you are running compiz try metacity, or if metacity try compiz. I think if the “Enable Desktop Effects” box is checked at the top of the dialog in Control Center -> Desktop Effects then you are running compiz, otherwise metacity. Actually I’m not so sure that switching to compiz could really fix anything, and it might make it worse, so don’t check it if it is unchecked.
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Also are you sure your drivers are running? From a terminal
glxinfo | grep render
should give results saying that it is directly rendering, and the OpenGL render string should not say anything Mesa, but I guess should rather say something involving Nvidia.
glxgears
should also work, and have a reasonably high frame rate.
The driver is working. glxinfo reports a Nvidia renderer and glxgears is running fine. I can play 3D games with wine so there seems to be all fine. But in the past i had to reinstall the nvidia driver several times because the DRI/GLX support broke (reinstalling fixed that immediately). I’m running compiz (I forgot about that fact because i’m only using the Window Placement Plugin for better window placement on dual screen) and disabling it seems to help… maybe there is a problem with the rather new GT240 as the latest driver already states some major bug fixes for that card. For the time being it looks like i have to get along without compiz.
Thanks for the hint.