KDE & Desktop Effect with Nvidia GeForce 8600GT

[Kevin Kofler]

Armelius Cameron wrote:
> One of our machines  has the following card (as reported by lspci):
> VGA compatible controller: nVidia Corporation G84 [GeForce 8600GT] (rev
> a1)
> 
> I have F14 x86-64 on the machine, fully updated. I use the shipped nouveau
> driver. I tried to enable desktop effect but a pop-up box says that it
> cannot enable desktop effect after I hit "Apply". I tried both OpenGL and
> XRender for compositing option.
> Is this a known problem ? Is there a website that lists what nvidia cards
> can use the full 3D of nouveau and desktop effect (esp. with KDE) ?
> 
> I have another machine that uses nvidia GeForce GTX 260 that works just
> fine with F14 and desktop effect (using XRender). Do those cards use
> different driver?

It's the same driver, but there are different code paths for different 
chipsets. There might be some problem with the XRender implementation on the 
8600GT. You can try Fedora 15 Beta (try the KDE Live image if you don't want 
to install F15 yet). Fedora 15 Beta will be officially released today. (The 
final Fedora 15 release is currently scheduled for May 24.)

For OpenGL support, you can try mesa-dri-drivers-experimental, but I don't 
think the version in Fedora 14 will work with KWin. Fedora 15 ships OpenGL 
support for Nouveau by default; to my knowledge, whether KWin desktop 
effects work with it hasn't been tested yet. (Again, you should be able to 
test it with the Fedora 15 Beta KDE Live image.)

        Kevin Kofler