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da_marius
April 16th, 2011, 06:42 PM
Hello,

I've been using Gnome-Shell from git for a while now and I just love it. The problem is that desktop effects aren't as smooth as they should be and I believe it's because of my graphics driver.

I have a Quadro FX 880M on my laptop and I'm using the proprietary 270.41.03 Nvidia driver from the ubuntu-x-swat ppa. Also my Ubuntu version is 10.10.

Gnome-shell is usable but the effects are a bit choppy (especially when I activate the overview). The problem is noticeable especially when there are windows with complex content like firefox.

I have also tried the live cds from the gnome 3 official website and there the effects ran a lot smoother. After searching a bit I found out that the os on that cd has the Nouveau driver.

So, hoping to obtain the same neat experience, I tried installing the libgl1-mesa-dri-experimental package. The shell does behave better but the driver seemed too unstable to me - the entire desktop would freeze for a few seconds when I launch an application from the shell overview and also some occasional crashing would occur.

To sum up, could someone please tell me: is there a way to improve gnome-shell's usability ? I would like to avoid at all costs things like compiling experimental drivers or stuff like that.

Thank you.

Krytarik
April 16th, 2011, 08:10 PM
You could try upgrading the "nouveau" driver through Xorg-Edgers' PPA. Note that this would upgrade quite a lot of other packages as well, including the proprietary driver.
https://launchpad.net/~xorg-edgers/+archive/ppa

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:xorg-edgers/ppa
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get upgrade
If you need/want to remove those PPA and downgrade the concerning packages again:

sudo apt-get install ppa-purge
sudo ppa-purge ppa:xorg-edgers/ppa

Greetings.

da_marius
April 16th, 2011, 08:15 PM
Thanks. Should I purge the ubuntu-x-swat first ?

Krytarik
April 16th, 2011, 08:22 PM
Should I purge the ubuntu-x-swat first ?
Not necessarily. I'd leave it activated. This way, if you purge the Xorg-Edgers' PPA, you wouldn't 'fall down' to the official repo version of the proprietary driver.

qx48
June 20th, 2011, 06:40 AM
Would this procedure also work in 11.04? I'm showing that I have the NVidia proprietary driver installed, and that it is activated but not currently in use. I'm running Gnome-Shell instead of Unity, and I think my system could really benefit from being able to utilize my GTX260.

wildmanne39
June 20th, 2011, 06:51 AM
Would this procedure also work in 11.04? I'm showing that I have the NVidia proprietary driver installed, and that it is activated but not currently in use. I'm running Gnome-Shell instead of Unity, and I think my system could really benefit from being able to utilize my GTX260.Hi, you dont have to worry about the not in use it is a bug, if you activated it and you see the green light it is working.