Compiz on Lenovo Z580 with Intel and Nvidia graphic cards and Debian squeeze

I bought a Lenovo a while ago, and installed Debian squeeze on it.

Now I managed to put a minimalistic GUI on it, but I think I can get much much more out of it. The problem starts with there are two graphic cards:

-an Nvidia GT635M
-and an Intel Graphics card of some king(I was unable to determine the driver, though I

read that intel has pretty good linux support, unlikke Nvidia)

I've got multiple problems: when I install the Nvidia driver , and try to use it the screen goes blank, sometimes white, sometimes black, with a flickering cursor. After a day of googling I decided to start with a fresh install and use the intel card insted, and just try to make compiz work on that, but the out-of-the-box driver for the intel card isn't enough for compiz, every time I try

compiz --replace

compiz comes back with something along the lines of:

Fatal: Software rendering detected

and doesn't start. I tried to tweak it with xorg.conf, I generated a config file with

X -configure

but It just made the screen blank, with a flickering cursor. I'm starting to give in to insanity after 2 days worth of googling, and so decided to write a question here before depression eats me.

My questions are: -Is there a way for the Intel and Nvidia cards to work together with X in harmony?(I'm not giving up on it yet)
-Apart from that, how can I determine which driver do I need from Intel? all I got from lspci is it's an intel Corp. device 0166, rev9(whatever that means, search returned nothing) -And finally: How can I get compiz to work? (Even with a single card)

Any help would be appreciated!

David Tóth

Posted 2013-02-26T18:10:44.450

Reputation: 137

update: the windows 8 instal said, the Intel card is an Intel HD Graphics card 4000 – David Tóth – 2013-02-26T18:35:29.803

Answers

Your system has hardware that is too new to run Squeeze properly. Add Backports and install the latest X.org and kernel from there - it should let you run Squeeze.

Calvin B

Posted 2013-02-26T18:10:44.450

Reputation: 206

How would I go about that? What are some decent repos for this? – David Tóth – 2013-02-26T19:38:06.523

I dunno, Debian Backports?

– Calvin B – 2013-02-26T20:16:45.117

okay, I added the repo, updated, but apt-get upgrade and dist-upgrade didn't do anything, I must be missing the packages I need to install – David Tóth – 2013-02-26T21:10:25.610

No, you need to tell apt you want to install Backports by specifying -t squeeze-backports. – Calvin B – 2013-02-26T23:11:15.697

installed the new intel driver through this, and even the new xserver-xorg, and I got the following errors:

compiz --replace compiz (core) - Warn: SmcOpenConnection failed: None of the authentication protocols specified are supported compiz (core) - Warn: SmcOpenConnection failed: None of the authentication protocols specified are supported compiz (core) - Fatal: Software rendering detected. compiz (core) - Error: Failed to manage screen: 0 compiz (core) - Fatal: No manageable screens found on display :0.0 – David Tóth – 2013-02-27T10:34:02.330

You may want to change the settings from GNOME. It's been years since I used GNOME 2, but it's in the last tab of Appearance. In addition, make sure you installed the Xorg metapackage to make sure nothing X is outdated, and make sure you have the latest 3.2 kernel. – Calvin B – 2013-02-27T10:47:50.690

what kind of settings should I look for? The last tad in appearence is "Fonts" – David Tóth – 2013-02-27T10:49:29.353

just upgraded the kernel from 2.6.x.x, to the backport version, and had to blacklist the novueau driver, installed the newest headers and the wireless driver(it's still slow though), and upgraded, reconfirgured compiz, but still doesn't work – David Tóth – 2013-02-27T12:00:03.943

okay, a new clean install of Wheezy came with gnome, and it's pretty good, I like it pretty much! I'm accepting the answers, because you helped me a lot! thanks! – David Tóth – 2013-02-27T21:39:24.770

NVidia's dual-graphics stuff barely works, and won't be usable in Squeeze without some serious tweaks. That said, the Intel driver should work fine. Delete the xorg.conf file, disable the nVidia card in your bios, and reboot. Install and run glxgears if you need to and make sure that you have hardware accelerated rendering. Compiz should start up just fine. Unfortunately, Compiz is a very outdated technology. The original maintainer isn't even maintaining it anymore. Gnome Shell, Kwin, XFWM4, and Enlightenment all provide their own hardware accelerated window managers. I know KWin4 can run separately from KDE, and it performs very well with Intel graphics.

omniuni

Posted 2013-02-26T18:10:44.450

Reputation: 1

I have a dual-boot system, and I want to use the nVidia card in windows is there a way to disable it only when linux boots up? – David Tóth – 2013-02-26T18:54:45.557

and if compiz is really outdated, is there an alternative? I'm open to any eye-candy – David Tóth – 2013-02-26T21:47:43.210

I don't know what desktop environment you're using, but if you're not using Gnome Shell, KWin4 runs very nicely even without the rest of KDE. It's also quite crash resistant, and uses native shaders to boost performance. You should be quite happy with the performance of KWin4 on Intel's hardware. Even without the rest of KDE loaded, KWin4 is more memory efficient than Compiz. On my computer, Kwin4, uses about 70MB, over 30MB are shared libraries with the rest of KDE. Some quick research indicates that Compiz can use over 100MB when running. – omniuni – 2013-02-26T22:56:12.427

Also, one other thing. Debian Squeeze was only released a few days ago, which is why there are no backports yet. You can safely remove those repositories for now. You will probably do best to just disable the nVidia card and not use it, nVidia never got card switching working very well on Linux (or Windows for that matter). If you ever get a new laptop, I prefer AMD's APU chips which use the same graphics card, and just scale it up and down. (I get 7+ hours out of my MSI netbook with RadeonHD) – omniuni – 2013-02-26T23:01:23.860

Is there a way to disable the nvidia card only with linux boot? – David Tóth – 2013-02-27T08:15:40.050

and I'm using gnome, unfortunately – David Tóth – 2013-02-27T08:19:24.837

Gnome Classic (Also deprecated) or Gnome Shell? Gnome Shell looks pretty slick all on its own! If you're wanting something like Gnome "Classic" but that's maintained, try XFCE. Either way, though, just install KWin4, and run the command "kwin --replace". – omniuni – 2013-02-27T14:28:58.547

a clean install of the test release came with a new shiny gnome out of the box! I think I like it pretty much, and stick with it! Thank you for the help! – David Tóth – 2013-02-27T21:40:33.787