32MB nVidia Driver Update Ubuntu Beryl - Compiz Fusion Fix

Author:
phil
Created:
Monday, March 10th, 2008
Last Updated:
Sunday, April 05th, 2009

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I'm not a Linux guy... I find Linux to be rather frustrating. It is a programmers operating system and I am not a programmer. That aside, I am writing myself a note on how to "fix" and update the nVidia driver on my laptop, and get it to work with Ubuntu Gusty 7.10 & Compiz-Fusion.

(If you are looking for Beryl, like I was for an hour and a half today... Beryl has merged with the extra plugins sector of Compiz and become Compiz-Fusion)

First off, we need to update the nVidia driver (I have a 32MB nVidia FX 5200 Go)

Go to Envy's website which is the "Unofficial ATI and NVIDIA driver installer for Ubuntu" and download the latest Envy software to automatically update the nVidia driver to the latest version.

There are guides on the site that explain how to install it on Ubuntu. Pretty simple. I installed v0.9.10-0ubuntu6 which even has a dependencies update with it. (v9.7 didn't work so well...)

Once the nVidia driver is installed and the computer has been restarted, (yadda yadda yadda...)

Install compiz-fusion. There is a wonderful Ubuntu Help Guide which is much more comprehensive than what I feel like typing up... (Why do something someone else has already done?)

Now the fun part that took me forever to figure out how to fix...
---
Doing some research, I found that Ubuntu Gusty, 7.10 and Compiz-Fusion has made a bold move keep anyone with less than 64MB of memory on their video card, from running compiz-fusion. Running compiz in a terminal window produces an error that displays the 32MB memory problem:

Less than 65536kb of memory and nVidiaaborting and using fallback: /usr/bin/metacity

So, to fix this, open a terminal:

sudo vim /usr/bin/compiz

Look for the memory settings a little ways down from the top:

# Minimum amount of memory (in kilo bytes) that nVidia cards need
# to be allowed to start
# Set to 262144 to require 256MB
NVIDIA_MEMORY="65536" # 64MB
NVIDIA_SETTINGS="nvidia-settings" # Assume it's in the path by default

Either comment out or change the NVIDIA_MEMORY="65536" # 64MB to NVIDIA_MEMORY="32768" # 32MB

Basically so it looks like this:

# Minimum amount of memory (in kilo bytes) that nVidia cards need
# to be allowed to start
# Set to 262144 to require 256MB
# Set to 32768 to hack around 64MB minimum limit
# Set to 65536 to revert back to 64MB (default)
NVIDIA_MEMORY="32768" # 32MB
NVIDIA_SETTINGS="nvidia-settings" # Assume it's in the path by default

If you update compiz in the future, you will have to change this setting back down to 32MB (32768) in order for it to work again. Since this is technically running compiz instead of beryl, there are potential problems with the black screen.

On a side note this configuration has all been done WITHOUT xserver-xgl

The "fix" was actuall borrowed from: http://ubuntuforums.org/archive/index.php/t-565186.html

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