nvidia

[sunny-O0WJhd4tT3hg9hUCZPvPmw at public.gmane.org (Laura Conrad)]

I was lazy (and desperate for a working computer) last summer when I
moved from my old machine to the relatively new one, and the easiest way
to get the computer hooked up to the monitor was to use a VGA cable,
although I had all the hardware for using a DVI cable.

Yesterday I finally got tired of watching X redraw pixel by pixel when
firefox had forced the machine to be swapping to death, and I put the
nvidia graphics card (not sure what model; whatever was cheap at newegg
in the fall of 2006) into the machine, and hooked up the DVI cable.

This has solved the problem of the screen redrawing too slowly when the
machine is swapping itself to death, because now X hangs well before
firefox has leaked memory into that state.  

googling suggests that using the nv driver instead of the nvidia
proprietary driver might be the right solution.  

Is that the consensus opinion?  This is a desktop computer that mostly
runs emacs, firefox, and xpdf (with some commandline programs), so I
don't need any fancy 3D features or anything.

Is there an easy way to switch back to the nv driver?  Currently I'm
attempting to do it by forcing a reinstall of the xserver-xorg-video-nv
driver.  (This is Ubuntu 9.04.)  It seems like using the package manager
to reconfigure X mightn't be the best possible way.

-- 
Laura   (mailto:lconrad-O0WJhd4tT3hg9hUCZPvPmw at public.gmane.org http://www.laymusic.org/ )
(617) 661-8097	233 Broadway, Cambridge, MA 02139   

Mom got to be quite a rabid fan, though...Everything I did was
sensational as far as she was concerned.  Now my father, as far as
*he* was concerned I never got a hit.  If I got a single, my mother
would scream, "Willie's hit a triple."  And Pop would say, "Ach, the
guy should have caught it."

Willie Kamm, quoted in "The Glory of their Times" by Lawrence S. Ritter