NVIDIA GE 8200 Problem with video tearing [[SOLVED]]

The problem
On my system which is comprised of a XFX mobo with integrated NVIDIA GE 8200 graphics card I had a problem with some applications, notably firefox, where when scrolling the rendered page would be chopped up, with a line of distortion between one section of good looking screen and another of good looking. As a result certain lines could not be read. Touching the top of the window and moving it (thus causing a repaint of the screen) solved the problem, but as soon as I scrolled it would return. As this was particularly evident with GMAIL it was a real bummer.

The solution
This problem is called screen tearing and apparently is an issue with the stable NVIDIA drivers under some configurations.

This thread describes the solutions and some of the work arounds

http://www.nvnews.net/vbulletin/showthread.php?t=115916

I used a hybrid solution of the one described there. Specifically, I uninstalled all traces of existing nvidia drivers etc following step 1 in the above post.

Then I downloaded the latest NVIDIA beta driver (180.22).

http://www.nvidia.com/Download/Find.aspx?lang=en-us

I then exited to a true terminal server: Ctl-Alt F2 and stopped the X server. This is necessary for the NVIDIA installer to work.

sudo /etc/init.d/gdm stop
sudo /etc/init.d/kdm stop

Then I downloaded the latest NVIDIA beta driver (180.22) and ran its executable (after making it executable chmod 777 NVIDIA....).

After that it worked fine.

There are some other suggestions in the above post -- such as placing the following command in your boot up cue so that it automatically executes.

nvidia-settings -a InitialPixmapPlacement=2 -a GlyphCache=1

and adjusting some of the advanced desktop effects in the window manager (see discussion in the above link).

Anyway even without the additional enhancements installing the new beta drivers solved the problem for me.

Getting SATA disk working on XFX 8400 mobo

My myth backend sits on a XFX 8200 motherboard. My initial intention was to install in it a Western Digital 1 Terebyte SATA Caviar Green hard disk. Unfortunately, my initial attempts failed because both Ubuntu and debian installers failed to recognize the disk.

I have subsequently found a post that explains how to get around this problem when installing linux (http://unixzen.com/?articles/2008/10/05/ubuntu-8-10-on-the-xfx-8200.html).


Essentially the solution involves adding the option pci=nomsi on the grub kernel boot line.

As I had already installed kubuntu on a smaller drive I decided to add the 1 terabyte drive by adding this option to the kernel line in in /boot/grub/menu.lst and this solved the problem.