nvidia – Kasperian Moving Parts

OpenSUSE 11.1 and nVidia == AWESOME!!

Monday December 22, 2008

Stark contrast to my last post, I know, but I felt it was only fair to blog about the wonders of OpenSUSE 11.1, even/especially with my little nVidia chip. First off, I still think there’s something wonky going on with X and/or nVidia’s driver in taking so long to start that kdm ends up giving up and committing hari kari, but my little workaround in extending ServerAttempts and ServerTimeout in kdmrc seems to be at least good enough to keep me from committing hari kari myself. And quite honestly, that’s about as much time as I want to spend on debugging it. =:/ But I updated to the KDE 4.2 beta2 packages again today and am absolutely loving OpenSUSE 11.1. Read more…

KDE, Linux

OpenSUSE 11.1 and nVidia?

So, first off, OpenSUSE 11.1 has to be the sweetest, best put together distro, like ever. Really amazing, quality stuff. The new installer has some excellent improvements, and package management has never felt zippier (zyppier??) However, there are a few problems that I’ve hit that I’m still trying to figure out after 2 days of fun and frolic. First off, I have a laptop (meaning I cant change the video card) with an nVidia chipset (meaning I’d like to change the video card). So while OpenSUSE 11.1 works really nicely with the open source “nv” video driver, it can’t do any compositing, 3d, OpenGL, etc., etc. (meaning no wobbley windows or cube goodness or translucency or… you get the idea…). Read more…

Desktop, KDE, Linux

Replace Laptop Video Card? Replace Laptop? Give Up Hope?

Sunday October 12, 2008

I just read Alexander Dymo (adymo)’s blog post “KDE4 performance on NVidia 8600GT: problem solved by bying ATI” and am quite sad because I’m pretty sure that it’s impossible to rip out the nVidia Quadro NVS 140M that’s crammed into the motherboard on my laptop and replace it with an ATI (or Intel?) chip. I know I blogged recently about how zippy KDE 4.2/trunk was after the latest nVidia driver update, but it only takes running for about a day solid until the performance on this laptop becomes unbearable again. And I’m not even using Firefox–thinking that Opera would fare better being Qt4 and all. Also making me sad is the fact that all 5 of the things Alexander mentioned Read more…

Desktop, KDE

nVidia 177.80 Released!

Wednesday October 8, 2008

Holy crap. KDE 4.2 frickin’ flies! And contrary to my previous post, now if I set IPP=2, everything’s blazing fast and I’m actually able to resize konsole again! WooooooT!!! YAY progress!!! [[ UPDATE ]] : Added link to my previous post. I had already posted my xorg.conf settings and since then, the only thing I’ve changed was IPP=2 from IPP=1. HTH!

KDE, Linux

KDE 4.2 (trunk) Now Rocking On My Thinkpad T61!!!

Friday October 3, 2008

My work laptop and main computing device is a Thinkpad T61 with an nVidia Corporation Quadro NVS 140M (rev a1) card. It’s been a frustrating last year in trying to run a KDE4 desktop as my main work and development environment because of the problems with the proprietary nVidia drivers that show up in KDE4. However, this little post is definitely more of a Huzzah!!! than a disgruntled grousing session. Lord knows we’ve had plenty of those. =:) Thanks to the folks at nVidia who are diligently working on improving the problems in their drivers!! Anyway, I’ve followed everything I could find on Lemma’s techbase pages and in the nVidia forums, but nothing has worked. Until now! I’m running the Read more…