December 17, 2006 Archives
F.I.R - Your Smile
Is one of my favourite songs of the moment.
I am running Ubuntu (Edgy Eft) with a 2.6.17 Linux kernel on my Dell XPS M1210 notebook. Beryl worked ok, but whenever I ran something considered "intensive", in terms of graphics processing, things would noticeably slow down, and the sound (music playing from a regular player) would slow down or be interfered with a screeching noise. The graphics card is Nvidia's go7400 with 64 Mb of memory, extensible to 256 Mb from the system. I was running the 1.0-9629 driver, released in early November 2006.
The driver provided in official distro repositories is always a bit in behind of the latest version available from Nvidia. Package "nvidia-glx" on Ubuntu installs a Build 8776 with Edgy Eft, which was not sufficient to run Beryl properly, even if it was as new as October.
Using Nvidia's installer on Ubuntu is an easy click-through. All you need to do is install these packages before running the installer:
- linux-kernel-devel
- linux-libc-dev
- xserver-xorg-dev
Just a few weeks ago (Dec 4), an upgrade (build 9631) came along. Downloaded it, but neglected to install it. Now that I did, there's no more screeching sound, and intensive processing (like, dragging a transparent desktop cube on Beryl 0.1.3) only slowed down for the 0.1secs upon starting the action. The only remaining problem is that on Beryl, I am limited to a certain number of expanded windows. Too many windows would mean that the latest that I opened would be totally black, with only the frame showing. The limit is still enough to fill five workspaces worth of windows, so it's not really a problem, unless you are at work, and can't bother to close windows you aren't using.