Intel Graphics Issues in OpenSUSE 11.3

Wednesday, August 25, 2010

I recently upgraded my laptop (Dell e6400, Intel GMA4500HD graphics) from openSUSE 11.2 to 11.3 and immediately ran into one annoying issue. With any sort of compositing effects enabled my laptop would lock up from time to time, usually about three to four times a day. As you can imagine this really killed my productivity.

After doing some research there appeared to be three potential solutions to this issue as follows:

1. Upgrade to a new kernel.
2. Switch to the intellegacy driver after updating X11, mesa and libdrm from the X11 repository
3. Upgrade the Intel video driver to 2.1.0

I reviewed the options and I opted to try the third one first as it was the least invasive and easiest to back-out if I ran into an issue. Fortunately it appears that this change does indeed fix the problem as my computer as been running continuously for the last 24 hours without an issue. Detailed instructions on making this change can be found in comment #45 of this bug report.

Note that you can ignore step #5 about removing intellegacy as that is only necessary if you tried the 2nd option above first. Also, if you run the 64 bit version of openSUSE as I do note that the path the driver needs to copied to is /usr/lib64/xorg/modules/driver rather then /usr/lib/xorg/modules/driver.

Posted by Gerald Nunn at 9:34 AM | Categories: Linux | Permalink