Tag Archives: X

Fedora 11 and the Nvidia Drivers

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Tried several times to get drivers from nvidia to work on a laptop and all I got was a black screen.

Did a bit more of a look and I discovered that F11 uses the new nouveau drivers as default. Which is great, but there is no support yet for this card in the nouveau project. So I need the nvidia drivers for decent GL. The nouveau drivers conflict with the ones from nvidia.

Once you have the nvidia drivers compiled and installed, either direct from nvidia or the rpmfusion project you need to recreate the initrd boot image.

# mv /boot/initrd-$(uname -r).img /boot/initrd-($uname -r)-nouveau.img
# mkinitrd /boot/initrd-$(uname -r).img $(uname -r)
# reboot

X should now start with the nvidia driver.

Xdmx rendering issues (gtk, qt and others)

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I have been setting up an Xdmx render wall. When finished it will be a 3×3 rear projected screen, with 9 computers (CentOS 5 installs) and 18 projectors for 3d visualization.

For a couple of years now Xdmx has been rolled into the Xorg source and getting it configured is really not that hard. When I have ironed out this install I may write a howto. But while some stuff was working just fine and dandy most apps that use a modern widget library for the UI (ala GTK or QT) were failing to render fonts properly, not drawing icons, messing up colors and just not looking right in general.

I scoured the interweb for answers, and the main thing I saw was just forum posts instructing users to turn of the Xorg render extension. This works, though makes the rendering of windows very, very slow. On what should be a high performance render wall I have an issue with this.

Anyway, I eventually found this post, and figured it was worth a try. And it Worked! brilliant! QT, GTK, Firefox, everything is looking peachy.

I threw it together in this patch file which I applied to the SRPM for xorg-x11-server.