This is kind of funny. I decided to let my machine upgrade from Intrepid Ibex (8.10) to Jaunty Jackalope (9.04) while I was in meetings all morning on Thursday. Great idea, I thought - let my machine toil away while I was away. And I was right (for the most part). I came back to a fresh, shiny new OS with better support for my machine than previously.
At work, it was an awesome new user experience with all kinds of improvements over Intrepid and since I've only been using Intrepid for a couple of weeks, THOUSANDS of improvements over my previous installation of Windows XP.
However, I had driven to work yesterday and hadn't had the normal 2 hours of bus riding to test out all the multimedia stuff. Today I did and ran into a serious problem. No support for playing back mkv, avi, mp4 or other video formats in Totem or VLC! When I went to launch the video, the program would crash with something similar to this error (reposted from another user with the same issue since I've resolved it on mine and can't reproduce the exact error):
DOH! Now I was certain I'd either have to switch my virtual desktop size down to only allow monitor mirroring in order to get videos to work, or I'd have to downgrade to Intrepid again. Big doh. I haven't done a downgrade in Linux before and I wasn't sure what, if anything could go wrong... Then I stumbled across a possible solution. Downgrade the graphics driver to an older version than ships with Jaunty. 3D effects on the desktop would likely not work very well, if at all, but they never did (let's face it, the D430 isn't exactly a gaming machine!). Worth a shot, especially if I was considering downgrading anyway.
After following the instructions here, I rebooted and found that I could now set my virtual desktop back to normal size AND still watch my videos! Sweet success...
For anyone else out there wondering if they should upgrade their D430 or any laptop with an Intel 945 graphics card, fear not. There is a viable solution that doesn't severly hamper your experience. Why they shipped with this craptastic driver is beyond me. But they did. And because it's Linux, we can deal with it anyway. :)
Please post if a patch comes out for this. Thanks muchly!
UPDATE: With the old driver, I am noticing some lag when scrolling large pages such as full-screen Firefox... It looks like there are some issues even with this driver. :(
UPDATE2: I've leapfrogged to the xserver-xorg-video-intel 2.7.1 version driver. It seems to be working as good as 2.4 but there is still a noticable lag when scrolling pages of text (Firefox). :(
At work, it was an awesome new user experience with all kinds of improvements over Intrepid and since I've only been using Intrepid for a couple of weeks, THOUSANDS of improvements over my previous installation of Windows XP.
However, I had driven to work yesterday and hadn't had the normal 2 hours of bus riding to test out all the multimedia stuff. Today I did and ran into a serious problem. No support for playing back mkv, avi, mp4 or other video formats in Totem or VLC! When I went to launch the video, the program would crash with something similar to this error (reposted from another user with the same issue since I've resolved it on mine and can't reproduce the exact error):
Binary package hint: xserver-xorg-video-intelAs he said, this worked perfectly in Intrepid and stopped working in the newly released Jaunty. I did a bit more digging on why this was and found that they had upgraded some things such that DRI2 no longer worked with the newer version of the Intel graphics driver needed for the D430 (specifically, the Intel 945).
xine, mplayer, or totem all crash when attempting to play any video file with an error like this one from xine:
This is xine (X11 gui) - a free video player v0.99.6cvs.
(c) 2000-2007 The xine Team.
X Error of failed request: BadAlloc (insufficient resources for operation)
Major opcode of failed request: 132 (XVideo)
Minor opcode of failed request: 19 ()
Serial number of failed request: 4731
Current serial number in output stream: 4732
This worked in Intrepid and does not work since updating to the Jaunty
DOH! Now I was certain I'd either have to switch my virtual desktop size down to only allow monitor mirroring in order to get videos to work, or I'd have to downgrade to Intrepid again. Big doh. I haven't done a downgrade in Linux before and I wasn't sure what, if anything could go wrong... Then I stumbled across a possible solution. Downgrade the graphics driver to an older version than ships with Jaunty. 3D effects on the desktop would likely not work very well, if at all, but they never did (let's face it, the D430 isn't exactly a gaming machine!). Worth a shot, especially if I was considering downgrading anyway.
After following the instructions here, I rebooted and found that I could now set my virtual desktop back to normal size AND still watch my videos! Sweet success...
For anyone else out there wondering if they should upgrade their D430 or any laptop with an Intel 945 graphics card, fear not. There is a viable solution that doesn't severly hamper your experience. Why they shipped with this craptastic driver is beyond me. But they did. And because it's Linux, we can deal with it anyway. :)
Please post if a patch comes out for this. Thanks muchly!
UPDATE: With the old driver, I am noticing some lag when scrolling large pages such as full-screen Firefox... It looks like there are some issues even with this driver. :(
UPDATE2: I've leapfrogged to the xserver-xorg-video-intel 2.7.1 version driver. It seems to be working as good as 2.4 but there is still a noticable lag when scrolling pages of text (Firefox). :(
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