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MatthR3D

Member

Registered: 2013-04-29

Posts: 5

[Nouveau + Nvidia] Firefox garbles the scrren and everything hangs

Hi,
I have an NVidia GPU (NVIDIA Corporation C61 [GeForce 6150SE nForce 430] (rev a2) according to lspci), with the nouveau driver. What's weird is that I often get full-on garbled screens and hangs: the screen turns white or black and is dotted. Nothing responds, I can't even halt with a short press on the power button, I need to do a hard halt (6s press).

For instance, it occurs with Firefox. I can install FF, run it, but the next time I reboot my computer and run Firefox, the screen garbles and everything hangs. I tried disabling hardware acceleration for Firefox, but it hangs all the same. Blender 3D also gave me some trouble, and sometimes it happens like that, poof.
I think it's my GPU or the GPU driver that's causing the problem. However, it happened a lot more when I was using GNOME3 than currently, as I'm using dwm.

All my packages are up-to-date, and I have nouveau-dri, xf86-video-nouveau, lib32-nouveau-dri.

Thanks in advance for your replies and please forgive my English errors, English is only my second language (I made my best though).

straykat

Member

From: Queensland, Australia

Registered: 2009-12-06

Posts: 60

Re: [Nouveau + Nvidia] Firefox garbles the scrren and everything hangs

MatthR3D,

This is a fairly old graphics card & maybe struggling with 3D rendering? This will be made worse as the card breaks down with age. I have had this happen to a GT7600 that I inherited from my son who used it for gaming on a Windows machine.

Have you tried installing the nvidia driver? If you get the same issues it maybe time for a new card?

MatthR3D

Member

Registered: 2013-04-29

Posts: 5

Re: [Nouveau + Nvidia] Firefox garbles the scrren and everything hangs

Thanks straycat for your reply,

This graphics card has never let me down when I'm on Windows, so I'll try doing the change to nvidia driver. But it's a pain, as it is proprietary; therefore, it sucks, and I prefer to use only free software.
I think I understand now why Linus Torvalds gave Nvidia the finger ... I'll try nonetheless.

Last edited by MatthR3D (2013-06-15 15:14:41)