compiz team mailing list archive

[Steve <steve@xxxxxxxxx>]

I fumbled around with Nvidia drivers and this black screen issue for two
days. And I fell into this pit because of the 14.04 upgrade from 12.04.
Grrr!

The original issue I was trying to resolve was the high cpu utilization
of firefox, compiz & Xorg which made the graphics fairly unusable. After
attempting to resolve that issue by upgrading the Nvidia driver, all
went south and the black screen of death ensued.

Here's some commands that speak to my desktop configuration in case that
helps...

"lshw" command produces:

    description: Mini Tower Computer
    product: OptiPlex GX270

"lspci -vnn | grep -i VGA -A 12" command produces:

    VGA compatible controller [0300]: NVIDIA Corporation NV18 [GeForce4
MX 440 AGP 8x]

"wmctrl -m" command produces:

    Name: Metacity
    Class: N/A
    PID: N/A
    Window manager's "showing the desktop" mode: N/A


At the end of the day, I'm not 100% sure what worked as I fumbled around so much. Here's what I think did it.

Use the following to get rid of all Nvidia bits and rely on the default
driver Nouveau.

    sudo apt-get purge "nvidia *"

Then opt for using Metacity instead of Compiz. Those are the two salient
changes I made and the result is a much improved graphics experience
with acceptable cpu utilization when doing something such as video
streaming from CNNx. Firefox still shows high cpu utilization in "nice
top" but that doesn't seem to impact the graphics and especially the
video streaming.

-- 
You received this bug notification because you are a member of compiz
packagers, which is subscribed to compiz in Ubuntu.
https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/1293384

Title:
  Compiz CPU usage dramatically increased in Ubuntu 14.04

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