[Ardour-Users] Can anyone help with a Linux problem ?

[John Emmas]

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Rob Quin" <robquin at uklinux.net>
>
> I use the Nvidia driver because I have never yet managed to get dual
> monitor display working with the open source driver and I just hate doing
> audio work on a single head setup.
>
A kindred spirit..!  On my main (i.e. desktop) machine, I use dual monitors
too, albeit with a Matrox card.  The Matrox card does use an open source
driver but isn't hardware accelerated.  Which Nvidia card do you use Rob,
just out of interest?

Anyway - an update on the situation:-  after installing the official nvidia
driver I found that I couldn't log in as myself any more (any attempt to log
in as me resulted in a blank white screen, instead of my familiar desktop).
But along the way, I'd discovered that 'root' could log in - and if I
created a new user, he could log in too!!  This was all on my laptop which
has the Nvidia chipset.

Yesterday I restored the partition I'd backed up before I started messing
about.  I then re-installed the Nvidia (hardware accelerated) driver, being
careful to avoid any mistakes I might have made on my previous attempt.
After re-installing, the problem has changed slightly. I still get the blank
white screen at boot up and nothing seems to be able to improve that.
However, if I press CTRL+ALT+F1, I can now log in as any registered
user - BUT ONLY if I've previously logged in as root..(?) The gnome desktop
simply doesn't play ball until I've logged in as root, at least once.

So I'm still baffled. I guess it could be a permissions problem but my gut
instinct is that there's just a bug in the driver that's preventing it from
initialising properly with my particular hardware. What's interesting though
is the difference (or lack of difference) that the new driver made to
Ardour.  Subjectively, there doesn't seem to be a great difference in the
canvas scrolling, whether I use the accelerated or non-accelerated driver
(by "canvas scrolling" I mean playing the timeline in stationary playhead
mode).  This seems to be confirmed too by Htop.  When playing a moderately
busy session, Ardour's main thread is using 82% cpu with the accelerated
driver and (gasp!) 88% cpu with the non-accelerated driver.  And my cpu is
still maxed out in both cases...   :-(

So it looks like a new laptop might be on my Christmas list.  The current
one was a top-of-the-range model when I first bought it but it's over 6
years old now, so maybe it's due for an upgrade.  Now where did I put that
Dell catalogue??

Thanks for everyone's help,

John