F17-alpha: UI unusable

[Adam Williamson]

On Fri, 2012-03-16 at 17:01 -0400, Gerry Reno wrote:
> On 03/16/2012 02:48 PM, Adam Williamson wrote:
> > On Fri, 2012-03-16 at 14:31 -0400, Gerry Reno wrote:
> >   
> >> On 03/15/2012 10:46 PM, Gerry Reno wrote:
> >>     
> >>> On 03/15/2012 10:30 PM, Adam Williamson wrote:
> >>>   
> >>>       
> >>>> On Thu, 2012-03-15 at 22:22 -0400, Gerry Reno wrote:
> >>>>   
> >>>>     
> >>>>         
> >>>>> Yeah, installed the beta and I'm still having the exact same problem.
> >>>>>
> >>>>> Graphics is Geforce FX 5600
> >>>>>     
> >>>>>       
> >>>>>           
> >>>> Ah. Then that'll be https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=745202 .
> >>>>   
> >>>>     
> >>>>         
> >>> Looks like it.
> >>>
> >>> My screen issues are a little bit different but I think it's the same
> >>> underlying problem:  driver issues.
> >>>
> >>>
> >>>   
> >>>       
> >> I just saw comment 47 in the bug.
> >>
> >> I'm not sure I understand the part about workaround with blacklisting.
> >>
> >> At no time do I have a working Terminal after reboot.  And what exactly
> >> ends up being blacklisted?  I thought only drivers got blacklisted.  How
> >> do you blacklist a card?   Does someone have an example?
> >>     
> > That's more a discussion for how we as the Fedora (and upstream GNOME)
> > devs can fix the problem than how you as a user can fix it.
> >
> > The 'blacklist' we're talking about is GNOME's blacklist of cards that
> > have 3D-accelerated drivers that seem to satisfy all the Shell
> > requirements, but are in fact known to be incapable of satisfactorily
> > rendering Shell. It's located
> > at /usr/share/gnome-session/hardware-compatibility (in F17, anyway, I
> > think it may have been different in F16). It blacklists based on the
> > Mesa renderer string; the level of granularity it's capable of depends
> > on how each Mesa driver decides to write its renderer string. For the
> > main drivers (Intel, Radeon, Nouveau) it's possible to achieve pretty
> > much GPU-level granularity.
> >   
> 
> Adam, thanks for that clarification.
> 
> Also, can you boil this down a little for those of us with nVidia FX
> NV3/NV4 graphics?
> 
> What can we expect for F17 in the way of supporting our nvidia graphics
> cards?
> 
> Just some type of non-accelerated solution?
> 
> Or will there be a driver written that will properly support these
> nVidia cards?

With the blacklist in place, you'd get the fallback mode. Right now,
anyway. It may change so that you wind up with software rendering of the
Shell.

Ben is working on a rewrite of the driver for these cards; what's
unclear is whether it will be done in reasonable time to get merged into
F17. If it does, we'll see if we can merge it in and remove the
blacklist. If it doesn't, you'll have the blacklisted behaviour with the
released F17.

> And I went looking into nVidia non-free driver but it appears there is a
> problem with glibc conflict that prevents use of these drivers.  Any
> comment on that situation?

It's a fairly well-known issue that you can't build the NVIDIA driver
against a debug kernel without tweaking something somewhere. It works
fine if you use a non-debug kernel.
-- 
Adam Williamson
Fedora QA Community Monkey
IRC: adamw | Twitter: AdamW_Fedora | identi.ca: adamwfedora
http://www.happyassassin.net