ATI and Nvidia troubleshooting thread

[el_koraco]

It's probably gonna be needed during the entire life cycle of Kubuntu. My experience so far has been, well, not ideal, but that's kinda to be expected. Running on a HD 4200 Mobility Radeon. The radeon driver is doing its job rather nicely, but of course, you'll get the urge to install drivers thorugh jockey. A possible bug with radeon and flash might be this one - link

Going with the proprietary fglrx driver from the "Addtional Drivers" utility will get you one of the following problems.

Boot screen

a) A low resolution splash screen, with dots and a vomit-like color, and a 1992. style virtual console. I've tried to correct the issue with the following tutorial - link/

But didn't manage to set the whole thing straight. Right now, I'm unable to get from the virtual console (CTRL ALT F1-6) to the graphical environment (CTRL ALT F7). I'm also not getting a full blown splash screen at the boot up, just a blue screen leading up to the KDE splash screen. Will tinker around with the options and get back to you.

Possibly an even less dangerous approach might be to use startup manager and hwinfo.

sudo apt-get install startupmanager
sudo sudo apt-get install hwinfo
sudo hwinfo --framebuffer

This will give you a list of resolutions supported for your framebuffer. You can then use Startupmanager to set the bootsplash resolution to the highest resolution possible, e.g. 1024x768 with 24 bits and so on.

b) Memory leakage. With radeon, Kubuntu is running at about 350 - 400 MB ram cold, but the memory footprint increases exponentially with usage, up to 1,7 GB, with the system crawling to a halt. Fglrx is known to cause such issues, and at the moment I am unsure as to whether this is a bug or tied to my hardware.

Desktop and video

When you install fglrx, you might start getting screen tearing in the desktop. The solution to it might be to go into settings, ATI Catalyst Control Centre and enable the "Tear free desktop option". This does not work with older cards. [


When you do that, and try to watch movies on your hard drive, you might get to see some skipping in the picture. my solution is to simply disable the "Tear free desktop" option when watching movies.

Courtesy of dr. schnelle, another option for those with never cards might be to can use Hardware Video Decode Acceleration and you will have (probably) tear free video playback and it will be offloaded to your GPU so you could watch hd movies without problem.

For hardware acceleration look here: http://wiki.cchtml.com/index.php/Ubu...XPERIMENTAL.29



That's it for now, we can fill this out some more with more problems and solutions that arise.

[7penselen]

Re: ATI and Nvidia troubleshooting thread

Even the recovery console is unreachable without removing the rule ending with .gfx and boot, gives a one time full functioned start. See the options in Grubscreen.

So I finally fixed this problem, perhaps the link above points to a nicer and better sollution, but this one is non-cli and easy to apply.

Install kde-config-grub2

Systemsettings -> Startup and Shutdown -> Grubboot loader -> Appearance -> kernel -> Boot in textmode.

Apply and reboot

A 10.10 like bootscreen appears. Fully text. Not very nice, but you can use Kubuntu's normal facilities.

[schnelle]

Re: ATI and Nvidia troubleshooting thread

b) Memory leakage. With radeon, Kubuntu is running at about 350 - 400 MB ram cold, but the memory footprint increases exponentially with usage, up to 1,7 GB, with the system crawling to a halt. Fglrx is known to cause such issues, and at the moment I am unsure as to whether this is a bug or tied to my hardware.

I have huge memory leak of kded4 process in kde 4.6 with radeon driver. And leak is present in both, Maverick and Natty with kde 4.6. When I install fglrx leakage stops.
So now I am using fglrx in Natty and my system is leak free so far. And fglrx in Natty works very well. Unfortunately if you have weak card you cannot enable tear free option. But I see you have radeon 4200 so you can use Hardware Video Decode Acceleration and you will have (probably) tear free video playback and it will be offloaded to your gpu so you could watch hd movies without problem.

For hardware acceleration look here: http://wiki.cchtml.com/index.php/Ubu...XPERIMENTAL.29

Only problem I have in Natty so far is noise I see some times described in this video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6HkxjeZfJrc
Do you have this problem in Natty?

[Hydra0]

Re: ATI and Nvidia troubleshooting thread

Let me see if I understand this correctly. It's better to install the ATI drivers from the ATI download site. Or am I misunderstanding and it's better to install from additional hardware? I have notebook ATI 4250HD.

[sithlord48]

Re: ATI and Nvidia troubleshooting thread

the Better for ease of install (and more likley to work) is from the "hardware drivers" program

teh better for newer functions is from the ati site, but if you have newer xorg version or kernel you could have some issues.

personally if i have to install the FGLRX driver i use the one from the ati page.

[el_koraco]

Re: ATI and Nvidia troubleshooting thread

I have huge memory leak of kded4 process in kde 4.6 with radeon driver. And leak is present in both, Maverick and Natty with kde 4.6. When I install fglrx leakage stops.

Only problem I have in Natty so far is noise I see some times described in this video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6HkxjeZfJrc
Do you have this problem in Natty?

lol. That's just to lol yourself out. Fglrx and radeon are the coolest drivers eva, it's never boring with either one. I'm having kinda the problem you are with krunner, yakuake and some other apps, but only when I run either of them for the first time. This is both with radeon and fglrx. Thanks for the input regarding videos, I don't watch HD videos myself, but will include your suggestion in the OP.

[exploder]

Re: ATI and Nvidia troubleshooting thread

I tried the fix for plymouth with the nvidea drivers used in 10.04, it breaks the nvidea drivers after a couple boots... I tried using startupmanager because it fixed plymouth in 10.10, it gave me a black screen on boot, sometimes displayed the splash on shutdown and re-boot but mostly produced some dots with a little blue around them.

Guess I will just keep an eye out for a solution for plymouth here, certainly someone will figure this out. On a good note, everything else seems to work pretty nice.

Edit: Just tried startupmanager on a fresh install and it fixed the plymouth issue with nvidea on my machine. Not sure what changed but it worked and if you have an nvidea card it might be worth your time to try this.

[el_koraco]

Re: ATI and Nvidia troubleshooting thread

What changed is that there was no forcing use of the framebuffer, so everything could go easier, would be my guess.

A good solution might be to do

sudo apt-get hwinfo
sudo hwinfo --framebuffer

to determine your max supported resolution, and then use startup manager to change it to, say 1024x768 with 24 bits and so on.

[el_koraco]

Re: ATI and Nvidia troubleshooting thread

A guy over at ubuntuforums says this fixed it for him. http://paolobernardi.wordpress.com/2...u-11-04-natty/

[exploder]

Re: ATI and Nvidia troubleshooting thread

A guy over at ubuntuforums says this fixed it for him. http://paolobernardi.wordpress.com/2...tu-11-04-natty

I noticed for example, startupmanager will fix plymouth on Kubuntu with no problem but does not fix Ubuntu 11.04. I wonder if the script might work on Ubuntu? If someone gives this a try in a Ubuntu install would you please do me a favor and post your results? I would like to mess with Unity on my other machine.

[kapil]

Re: ATI and Nvidia troubleshooting thread

thanks for starting this thread.. i was finding the solution for my amd vision laptop with HD 4200 radeon.
i had kubuntu amd64 10.10 and ubuntu 32bit 10.10 installed on my laptop.
here is what i found:
kubuntu amd64: installed the drivers using additional drivers app. problem i faced was a bit (not _that_ noticeable) jerky video playback. plus the tearfree option is not present
ubuntu 32bit: installed the drivers. tear video. used the tearfree option from catalyst results in bit jerky video. disabled the driver..jerky video persist

NOW in natty i decided not to install the drivers. and continue on whatever the (k)ubuntu recognizes.
Result: no tearcuts no jerky video. very smooth and hi quality video playback.

my advice would be to use the open source driver which ubuntu recognizes by default.

[el_koraco]

Re: ATI and Nvidia troubleshooting thread

If on a dekstop with a good fan, definetly. Unfortunately, my laptop becomes an inferno if I use radeon. I can live with it in winter time, but not with summer comming.

[cloudslayer]

Re: ATI and Nvidia troubleshooting thread

In my case (ATI Radeon HD 3650) the open source usually performs much better than the closed driver.

I say ususally because the open source driver in 11.04 is completely broken for my configuration (once the window manager goes entirely crazy). The closed driver does work fine (but sadly much slower than I'm used to).

[sithlord48]

Re: ATI and Nvidia troubleshooting thread

In my case (ATI Radeon HD 3650) the open source usually performs much better than the closed driver.

I say ususally because the open source driver in 11.04 is completely broken for my configuration (once the window manager goes entirely crazy). The closed driver does work fine (but sadly much slower than I'm used to).

there is no way that the open driver is going to out proform the properiatary driver (at least any time soon.) not saying the fglrx driver is not broken for you but im just wondering if you have upgraded w/ the properitary driver installed, or if its a fresh install. i've got the fglrx driver on both my ati machines atm (one 4250HD mobile and a 4830HD). im very impressed that its working correctly on my this compaq passiaro as last time i tried to use it would just lockup on any power event. now it works very good.

[cloudslayer]

Re: ATI and Nvidia troubleshooting thread

In my case (ATI Radeon HD 3650) the open source usually performs much better than the closed driver.

I say ususally because the open source driver in 11.04 is completely broken for my configuration (once the window manager goes entirely crazy). The closed driver does work fine (but sadly much slower than I'm used to).

there is no way that the open driver is going to out proform the properiatary driver (at least any time soon.) not saying the fglrx driver is not broken for you but im just wondering if you have upgraded w/ the properitary driver installed, or if its a fresh install. i've got the fglrx driver on both my ati machines atm (one 4250HD mobile and a 4830HD). im very impressed that its working correctly on my this compaq passiaro as last time i tried to use it would just lockup on any power event. now it works very good.

Nope, fresh install.

fglrx used to be EXTREMELY slow when it came to resizing windows (which in this version has been fixed thank god) while I never had that problem with Radeon. Things like video etc also work better with Radeon (less dropped frames etc), even in this version.

I do seem to have the impression that disabling blur causes a HUGE performance increase on my pc when it comes to fglrx, making it useable again...