Arch Linux

Roland Deschain

Member

Registered: 2013-09-23

Posts: 5

[SOLVED] Nvidia Driver 325.17 Massive Screen Tearing

Hello everyone! I just got Arch Linux fully installed on my Bonobo Extreme and everything is going great except for two issues I've been having.

The first issue is related to wifi networks and I will post in an appropriate thread.

The second is that I'm getting horrible screen tearing with the standard Nvidia drivers that are in the Arch repositories. I've had this issue before and I've been able to narrow it down to the drivers themselves.

With 310, and 319 I get no screen tearing what-so-ever on my laptop, so I decided to install the 319.49 drivers directly from the Nvidia website. Unfortunately this isn't as easy as it seems. I've been able to run through this install process before, but I'm getting errors this time around.

Here's what I did:

sudo pacman -Rs nvidia to remove the 325.17 drivers

logged out of KDE and typed exit so I could log in as root

Typed sh NVIDIA... and so on

And this is the error message I get (taken from /var/log/nvidia-installer.log -

nvidia-installer log file '/var/log/nvidia-installer.log'
creation time: Mon Sep 23 04:54:54 2013
installer version: 319.49

PATH: /usr/local/sbin:/usr/local/bin:/usr/bin:/usr/bin/core_perl

nvidia-installer command line:
    ./nvidia-installer

Using: nvidia-installer ncurses user interface
WARNING: Skipping the runlevel check (the utility `runlevel` failed to run).
-> License accepted.
-> Installing NVIDIA driver version 319.49.
-> Performing CC sanity check with CC="cc".
ERROR: The kernel header file '/usr/src/linux-3.11.1-1-ARCH/include/linux/kernel.h' does not exist.  The most likely reason for this is that the kernel source path '/usr/src/linux-3.11.1-1-ARCH' is incorrect.  Please make sure you have installed the kernel source files for your kernel and that they are properly configured; on Red Hat Linux systems, for example, be sure you have the 'kernel-source' or 'kernel-devel' RPM installed.  If you know the correct kernel source files are installed, you may specify the kernel source path with the '--kernel-source-path' command line option.
ERROR: Installation has failed.  Please see the file '/var/log/nvidia-installer.log' for details.  You may find suggestions on fixing installation problems in the README available on the Linux driver download page at www.nvidia.com.

I've never run into this issue before and I have no idea how to solve it. My only other options are to install the 304 drivers, which will work, but I plan on doing a lot of gaming and I know for a fact that they run sluggish on my system.

Has anyone else experienced this issue or know how to fix it? I'm using KDE 4.11 with Kwin and I've already fiddled with all the settings in nvidia-settings, kwin settings, settings just about everywhere and nothing makes it go away. I even get horrible tearing when I scroll down a web page.

Anytime I fiddle with the Kwin settings I can eventually get a setting that will work, but it always goes back to the horrible flickering once I restart my system.

My graphics card is a nVidia Geforce GTX 765M.

If anyone could help me out it would be much appreciated. This is literally all that is keeping me from using this as my main system.

Last edited by Roland Deschain (2013-11-17 01:43:05)

brebs

Member

Registered: 2007-04-03

Posts: 3,742

Re: [SOLVED] Nvidia Driver 325.17 Massive Screen Tearing

decided to install the 319.49 drivers directly from the Nvidia website

Bad idea. You have a package manager which is all set up to package the nvidia drivers - *use* it.

There's a patch for nvidia 325 to be compatible with kernel 3.11, but I've not seen anyone say it works with nvidia 319. So you might need to downgrade your kernel to 3.10.x first.

Roland Deschain

Member

Registered: 2013-09-23

Posts: 5

Re: [SOLVED] Nvidia Driver 325.17 Massive Screen Tearing

For anyone still looking for a solution -

It's caused by KDE's exerimental Wayland compositor. The Gnome side of things has it fixed with their Wayland plugin for Mutter. Installing Cinnamon/Gnome 3 fixed it for me.