f14 gnome unusable

Mark Eggers mdeggers at gmail.com
Fri Nov 5 07:23:44 UTC 2010


On Thu, 04 Nov 2010 12:27:48 -0500, Steve Berg wrote:

>> http://forums.fedoraforum.org/showthread.php?t=253668
>>
>> Quoting the relevant bit:
>> Update - apparently this issue is related to the GTK theme in use. The
>> default (Fedora, or Clearlooks, or a few others) results in this slow
>> behaviour. Other themes, like Nodoka and a few others perform fine.
> 
> Seeing the same slowdown on three different F14 installs here.  The
> Nimbus themes seem to perform normally.
> 
> --
> *       Stephen Berg       *
> *  sberg at mississippi.com   *
> *  Sinners can repent,     *
> *  But stupid is forever.  *

Fedora 14 on a 2.6 GHz P4, overclocked 7600GS
Using either NVidia 260.19.12 or 256.53

Had the same problem here. Most of the time I run WindowMaker or KDE, so 
the slowdown didn't bother me.

Then I made the mistake of running gnome mines . . . 100% CPU 
utilization, poor screen refresh once it recovered, and a variety of 
other unpleasantness.

I prowled around on the NVidia forums and someone had posted the same 
issues. It seems that the problem (according to this poster) is with the 
NVidia drivers (all recent versions), Xorg 1.9, and cairo/cairomm 1.10.

It really appears to be an NVidia driver issue. Other issues with 
260.19.12 include the inability to overclock and crashes in some 
applications linked with SDL, pulseaudio, and GL.

Reverting back to 256.53 fixes the overclocking and program crashes, but 
doesn't fix the problems with applications that use cairo/cairomm.

In order to fix those issues, the poster recommended downgrading to the 
last 1.8 version available in Fedora 13. I basically followed the 
poster's instructions and did this:

1. Created a file /etc/yum.repos.d/fedora-13.repo containing:

[fedora13]
name=Fedora 13 - $basearch
failovermethod=priority
baseurl=http://download.fedoraproject.org/pub/fedora/linux/releases/13/Everything/$basearch/os/
enabled=1
metadata_expire=7d
gpgcheck=1
gpgkey=file:///etc/pki/rpm-gpg/RPM-GPG-KEY-fedora-$basearch

2. Created a file /etc/yum.repos.d/fedora-13-update.repos containing:

[f13-updates]
name=Fedora 13 - $basearch - Updates
failovermethod=priority
baseurl=http://mirrors.usc.edu/pub/linux/distributions/fedora/linux/updates/13/$basearch/
enabled=1
gpgcheck=1
gpgkey=file:///etc/pki/rpm-gpg/RPM-GPG-KEY-fedora-$basearch

3. Ran the following command:
yum --nogpgcheck --noplugins --disablerepo=* --enablerepo=fedora13 downgrade cairo cairomm cairo-devel cairomm-devel

(all on one line)

If you're running x64, make the appropriate adjustments.

4. Restart the X server (I rebooted)

Now I can run gnome mines without locking up the system, and font 
rendering is back to what it was with Fedora 13.

I don't know what other issues will occur with this downgrade since I've 
only been running this configuration for about 20 minutes.

Hopefully NVidia will fix their drivers.

Also from the NVidia forums, the nouveau drivers do not have this issue.

Hope this is useful.

. . . . just my two cents.

/mde/




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