[Sussex] video snags (possibly nvidia related, but possible bug) - best suggestions ?

[john davis]

Wotcha List,

Well the new PC seems to work fine, it's the latest incarnation of Ubuntu
(11.04) that's causing issues now.

I'm unable to get the nvidia driver working. As far as I can tell, it's
installed, but if I check the "Additional Drivers" facility, the dialogue
box says that "No proprietary drivers are in use on this system" and at the
bottom of the dialogue box it says

"This driver is activated but not in use".

Now I'm completely stumped on this, because whatever it is that's driving
the graphics card, it causes some video's to be choppy and/or some large
pixellation, and when I play something like Kpatience, I'm sometimes getting
some part of a playing card over lapping and obscuring what should be
showing - that disappears when I click on the pack to deal another card, but
sometimes it makes it worse.

I use the proprietary driver as a rule, because I've just never had any
success with open drivers and nvidia cards, yet it seems that nvidia do a
better job with linux based systems than ATi do.

It doesn't seem to matter what I try it doesn't want to work.

Plus I don't really want to try the manual install route for the driver, as
I won't be able to recover the system if "they" release another newer kernel
version for it which won't have the kernel module for the graphics card, and
like a lot of others, I'm blind without a GUI to re-install the graphics
driver (especially as they seemed to have changed things with xorg and now
there's virtually nothing in the /etc/X11/xorg.conf).

Does anyone have any idea about my way ahead ?

If it was my old PC, I could just revert to an earlier ubuntu that did work
ok, but the only one I've ever had on this new PC is 11.04, which frankly,
seems rubbish for not sorting something as obvious as this (according to
others at the Ubunut forums) bug ?

Or is it time to dump ubuntu completely and try something else ?

As ever, any guidance is very much appreciated

regards

John D.
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