Graphics with intel GPU

[Nathan]

On Fri, May 15, 2009 at 6:51 AM, Arnaud MEZ <arnaudmez at gmail.com> wrote:
> i really need to activate that compiz thing cause my laptop seems like
> boring without it.

:-)

I agree.

I also have a laptop with an i965 card and I've gotten it to work just
fine over the past couple of days. However, many others with similar
but not quite identical cards are having problems. So, you should give
this a shot, but YMMV.

First, you will need to know how to force Compiz to start anyway. I
did this by removing my card's PCI ID from the blacklist. Your card's
PCI ID can be found by typing 'lspci -nn | grep VGA' and looking for
an eight-digit hexadecimal number, for example you might see this:

00:02.0 VGA compatible controller [0300]: Intel Corporation Mobile
GM965/GL960 Integrated Graphics Controller [8086:2a02] (rev 03)

So, my PCI ID is 8086:2a02 -- I just edit the /usr/bin/compiz file,
find the line on which it appears, and comment it out (by inserting a
# character at the beginning of the line).

You can also skip this step by running compiz with the SKIP_CHECKS
environment variable set to yes. You won't have to edit the file this
way.

OK, now you will be able to run Compiz, but most likely, the
performance will be pretty poor in the default EXA mode with the
jaunty Xorg driver. There are a couple of things you can try here.

1) Try UXA mode. This is new, and improves performance dramatically,
but isn't on by default because of uncertain stability. It's worked
perfectly for me for the past week, and I haven't run into any
stability issues. If this works for you, I think it is by far the best
option. Full instructions are at:

    https://wiki.ubuntu.com/X/UxaTesting

2) Other people have had success rolling back the Xorg driver to the
version that worked in Intrepid. This didn't work for me, but
apparently worked for many others. Those instructions are at:

    https://wiki.ubuntu.com/ReinhardTartler/X/RevertingIntelDriverTo2.4

3) Hopefully one of the above options will work for you. If not,
there's an option I've seen suggested that didn't work for me either,
but could be worth a try.  Edit your xorg.conf file, and in the
"Device" section add the following lines:

     Option "AccelMode" "EXA"
     Option "MigrationHeuristic" "greedy"

Hope one of these works for you.

Cheers
ND