Comments on: Current State of Intel Video, Ubuntu, and Composited Desktops

By: sogrady

sogrady — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 03:12:52 +0000

That’s actually how the system identifies itself, both in LSPCI and in /var/log/Xorg.0.log.

(–) PCI:*(0:0:2:0) 8086:2a42:17aa:20e4 Intel Corporation Mobile 4 Series Chipset Integrated Graphics Controller rev 7, Mem @ 0xf0000000/4194304, 0xd0000000/268435456, I/O @ 0x$

But yes, it’s definitely a bug

Will try launching it a different way.

By: Roy Schestowitz (schestowitz) 's status on Friday, 06-Nov-09 00:35:16 UTC - Identi.ca

Fri, 06 Nov 2009 00:36:17 +0000

[...] Assessment of #GNU #Linux by #RedMonk Analyst http://redmonk.com/sogrady/2009/11/04/intel-video/ [...]

By: Links 05/11/2009: KDevelop Beta 6, ApacheCon Coverage | Boycott Novell

Links 05/11/2009: KDevelop Beta 6, ApacheCon Coverage | Boycott Novell — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 23:58:55 +0000

[...] Current State of Intel Video, Ubuntu, and Composited Desktops The most interesting aspect of the project, from my perspective, is Mutter. Mutter is essentially Metacity with the Clutter technologies baked into it. As Joe Gregorio noted back at OSCON, Clutter’s a popular project these days, and for good reason. Built by the Intel-acquired OpenedHand team, among others, Clutter offers aesthetically pleasing, thoroughly modern graphics capabilities that, even better, are fast. Indeed, of the available compositing options for my hardware, the only one that performs adequately is the next generation option in the Clutter based GNOME Shell. That is most unusual; the bleeding edge stuff is typically very slow. [...]

By: Adam Williamson

Adam Williamson — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 07:59:45 +0000

What you have looks rather like what we extremely technical people like to refer to as a ‘bug’. have you tried launching compiz a different way – with compiz-icon, or just from the command line? I wonder if it’s a bug in Ubuntu’s compiz-activation-doohickey.

you’re not really identifying hardware precisely enough to be sure other people have the same as you. When it comes to Intel chipsets you can really only go by the PCI ID, the exact identifying line from /var/log/Xorg.0.log is a good thing to cite.

By: sogrady

sogrady — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 20:40:30 +0000

@Paul Cooper: interesting, as Thinkwiki.org reports that you have the same on board video hardware as i do. i’m not sure it’s an Ubuntu problem, though, as i’ve tried a variety of Ubuntu and non-Ubuntu video drivers with no impact: it just doesn’t work for me.

maybe it’s time to pave this instance (it’s been upgraded four times now).

as for Mutter, yeah, i was surprised too. works pretty much seamlessly. video is a little wonky after multiple suspends, but otherwise it’s pretty, but fast.

By: Paul Cooper

Paul Cooper — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 18:11:49 +0000

Compiz works fine for me in Fedora 11 (on an x200s, and Intel gfx Macbook), so I would assume that this is a problem of how Ubuntu integrates the driver. Similarly colleagues haven’t had any issues with Debian or Mandriva.

That Mutter works best is pleasing but strange too because it relies more DRI2 etc being setup correctly.