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I've installed Oneiric from scratch (didn't upgrade), and I'm having troubles with desktop effects: Unity is very slow - whenever I click on the workspaces icon, I either get no animation, or the animation just hangs for a second or so before it's completed. Other behaviors feel similarly unresponsive. For example, whenever I try to move a window on the desktop, it will lag behind for a while before it catches up with the mouse pointer. Gnome Shell feels slightly better, but not by much.

The CPU is an AMD Athlon II X2, I have 4 GB RAM, and the video card is is an Nvidia GeForce 6150SE nForce 430.

I've tried playing around with nvidia-settings; I've installed/removed every single Nvidia driver in the repositories (currently using nvidia-173); I've changed the Compiz settings following solutions for similar issues (unchecked "Detect refresh rate", and so on), without any success - in fact, I didn't even manage to make things worse. ;)

glxgears looks great, and it feels like the driver is working really well for everything except desktop effects. Unity 2D is fine, and I'm using it right now.

belacqua
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WPBloyd
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2 Answers2

3

I have the same nvidia card (GeForce 6150SE nForce 430) and experienced the exact same problem as WPBloyd (desktop effects were very slow, but it was otherwise fine) using the nvidia driver.

I followed the instructions on this page in order to use the "Nouveau" driver (open-source driver for nvidia cards).

Problem: Need to fully remove -nvidia and installing or reinstall -nouveau from scratch

Here is a recipe which removes all old video drivers, and reinstalls nouveau:

sudo nvidia-settings --uninstall
sudo apt-get remove --purge nvidia*
sudo apt-get remove --purge  xserver-xorg-video-nouveau
sudo apt-get install nvidia-common
sudo apt-get install xserver-xorg-video-nouveau
sudo apt-get install --reinstall  xserver-xorg-core
sudo dpkg-reconfigure xserver-xorg

(I copied what I used; it is the same as on the last link, except that I suppressed server-xorg-video-nv, libgl1-mesa-glx and libgl1-mesa-dri because they did not seem to exist anymore)

It worked for me, I hope this can help somebody else :)

Community
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Emile
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0

The only and best recommendation to be done at this moment is to stick with ubuntu-2d. Nvidia and ATI cards and known to slow everything down (tried playing movies yet???) usind the 3d effects. Nothing you can do will solve this 100%, its a driver issue.

Bruno Pereira
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