This article appears too late i suppose in this site. Many know about it already. Just in case, i am posting it.

So if your xserser-xorg-video-intel is not that satisfactory to you, or if it doesn’t give the right screen resolution, just use this. If available in repos use it, if not use this link. You will have to remove xserver-xorg-video-intel either manually or through package manager. Then after installation restart Xserver (Ctrl+Alt+Backspace; Enable it thus in Karmic)

That should bring the resolution right or at least make it better.

Thanks to these articles and in case of problems please follow the links:

The PAINLESS way to set Screen Resolution for Intel Chipsets

Can’t change resolution with 915resolution

Finally got desktop effects working (915resolution + xorg.conf)

So this is a short post on one pestering problem. If youre using Jaunty and find this problem then use the link that follows.

When i installed Jaunty i had problems (as usual). One of them was this. First off, videos wont play in any video player. Codecs are in place, no doubt. But the player would go crashing down. Even vlc, which uses a seperate set of codecs fails

Then, desktop effects wont enable. No matter what. An irritating piece of  thing.

But it was so queer that when rhythmbox (may be others too; i dont know) starts playing (not just open but playing) videos work! But i dont think video players should be dependent on music players.

So what worked for me was I rolledback to intrepid’s version (2.4) version of xserver-xorg-video-intel. Now no problems videos play and compiz is enabled.

Click here to find out how to revert to the 2.4 version.

Hope this helps.

NVIDIA released their new set of beta drivers yesterday, with a version 180.04. While going through the release notes, I found this line very interesting.

Added initial support for PureVideo-like features on Linux via the new VDPAU AP.

Now I don’t know what exactly they mean by “initial support” but nonetheless its a pretty good that they (finally) decided to add PureVideo support.

In case you’re wondering what PureVideois all about, PureVideo is a decoder which offloads decoding of MPEG2 & H.264 streams over to GPU, leaving the CPU free for other tasks. Read up on PureVideo more on the wiki.

Links to the drivers: x86 / x86-64

Here’s my how-to on installing the drivers.

Do note that the drivers are still BETA.

Many of us may feel screen resolution as the biggest pest in any OS. If we don’t get the screen resolution we want we get real fed up with the UI (dont we?). Personally, I very much hate if screen resolution gets screwed up and also have faced a lot of problems on that.

So I thought I would make a post on the common problems I faced in ubuntu and I hope it would be useful for other distros too.

[...]

Last night NVIDIA quietly uploaded a new Linux display driver to their FTP server. This new driver is tagged 171.05, while the latest public driver has been 169.09. Having already three releases in the 169.xx series, this is a moderate update to 171.xx, but according to NVIDIA it’s not for everyone. There is no official change-log that NVIDIA has published for the 171.05 driver, and the change-log that ships with the driver hasn’t been updated (whether it be intentional or not). The only word that has come out of the NVIDIA camp on this new driver is from Christian Zander and he has said that this driver is only intended for use with the Tesla S870 GPU Computing Systems. The legacy NVIDIA Linux drivers have also been updated this week.
NVIDIA’s Tesla S870 GPU computing system is designed for high-performance computing (HPC) environments and has a total of 6GB of dedicated video memory, which is shared by the four 128 processing core GPUs that make up the S870, and is all housed inside a 1U rackmount chassis. NVIDIA’s Tesla was originally introduced in June of last year, but the 171.05 driver is the first Linux release to support the Tesla S870.
So far we noticed one change with the 171.05 driver and that is the introduction of a new NVIDIA utility, nvidia-smi. This utility is for the NVIDIA System Management Interface and provides system-state and diagnostic information. Nvidia-smi will dump this system information either as ASCII text or into an XML log. In addition to the output format, other arguments include -l for creating an infinite loop of nvidia-smi, -t for toggling the LED state, and -i for probing every specified number of seconds. According to the man page and the –help output, nvidia-smi is only designed for the NVIDIA Tesla S870. However, nvidia-smi had run with a GeForce 8 graphics card installed but with little information. Likewise, the 171.05 driver during our initial tests had worked just fine when using it in a non-Tesla environment.
You can try out this driver by heading on over to the NVIDIA FTP server.

Source: Phoronix

Technorati Tags: Linux, NVIDIA, Drivers

NVIDIA has released a new Linux display driver, which is a stable version of their previous 169.04 beta last month. In addition, the new NVIDIA 169.07 Linux driver has a few changes, while most of the release highlights were already found in the 169.04 release. We are preparing additional Linux tests with this new driver, but for right now we have the details on this proprietary display driver.

The NVIDIA 169.04 beta driver had introduced GeForce 8800GT support a month ago, while in this 169.07 driver the support is officially there as well as for the GeForce 8800GTS 512MB and GeForce 8800M. Another feature originally introduced in 169.04 was improved mode-setting support on Quadro and GeForce 8 graphics cards and addressing some stability concerns (including for SMP users). This driver also has some performance improvements for the GeForce 8 series.

The 169.07 drivers fixes some XRender issues. Another new fix in 169.07 is fix for scrolling ARGB X drawables in Qt and improved interlaced DVI, HDMI, and HDTV mode-setting.

For those using the NVIDIA proprietary driver for workstation purposes, the CUDA (Compute Unified Device Architecture) driver is now included with the executable file.

Aside from the mentioned changes, there doesn’t appear to be anything else new in the NVIDIA 169.07 driver. The x86 release notes and download link can be found from the NVIDIA’s website.

Part 2 deals with installation of ATi drivers and visually enhancing that ubuntu
First of the Ati drivers
Ati have released catalyst 7.11 for Linux. Download this from their website. Next login as root in ubuntu. Then double click the downloaded file. You will get different options here choose to run the file. The next screen asks you if you want install the drivers or if you want to generate a package. Choose to install the drivers. Then after the installation one will have to manually change the drivers to fglrx. To do this open up a terminal and type

sudo dpkg-reconfigure xserver-xorg

Go through this wizard and at the part where you have to select the drivers(vesa will be the default one) press the up arrow button and go up to select the fglrx drivers.
Continue the wizard and restart X-server by pressing ctrl+alt+backspace.

Now let’s get some themes
First GNOME& Xfce users go to http://gnome-look.org and KDE users to kde-look.org.

Now in gnome-look.org
Gutsy users can browse through metacity themes and download. Then under System->Preferences
select appearance and then select install theme.
Fiesty users need to download GTK 2.x themes.
For Gnomer’s
Go to synaptic and search for gcursor. Install it. Restart X. Go to gnome-look.org. Download your favourite cursor theme. Open gcursor and select install theme and voila instant pimpin.
That’s about it for now. More tutorials soon!

Phoronix reports that NVIDIA’s 169.04 driver brings out a lot of improvements over its predecessor. This X.Org driver contained a number of GeForce 8 fixes, initial support for the GeForce 8800GT graphics card, monitoring of PowerMizer state information, and other changes. 

What Phoronix had not tested, however, at that time was a performance comparison of the new driver and the previous 100.14.23 driver. The undocumented fact we have found is that this 169.04 Beta driver does deliver performance improvements for the GeForce 8 series on Linux.

[...]

NVIDIA has released new BETA drivers for x86 and x64 (AMD64/EM64T). This new driver is now off of their latest 169 code line and will possibly net some performance benefit on top of the long release highlights list:

• Added support for GeForce 8800 GT.
• Improved modesetting support on Quadro/GeForce 8 series GPUs.
• Fixed stability problems with some GeForce 8 series GPUs.
• Fixed stability problems with some GeForce 6200/7200/7300 GPUs multi-core/SMP systems.
• Improved hotkey switching support for some Lenovo notebooks.

[...]

Hakan Bayindir at Phoronix writes about ATI’s new drivers, their performance(Non-performance, should I say ?).

It’s been nearly seven months since I wrote my first article about ATI drivers and how they literally crippled my computer and my daily life. Last month, ATI had finally released their latest drivers which contains the new OpenGL component and AIGLX support (AMD 8.42 Linux Display Driver). Was this release worth the amount of hype and did it solve everyone’s problems? For me, simply, no. After seven months of waiting, updating, and struggling, things are not good for me, in every possible feature of the ATI Linux driver I use.

ATI released six drivers since the first article I wrote at Phoronix and I have installed and used all of them. While some of the drivers showed some improvements over my problems, nothing has fully recovered. I am still having some problems, which can be grouped as follows:

· Hardware issues
· 2D acceleration & video playback issues
· 3D acceleration & AIGLX issues

[...]