Compiz Redrawing Problem under Ubuntu 8.10

Ever since I moved to Intrepid Ibex, I’ve been having problems with screen redrawing.  It was a little bit of a pain to isolate the culprit, but I was pretty sure that it was Compiz-Fusion.  In xterm, emacs, and a few other applications I would have sections of the window or buffer that would be blank until I had clicked or pressed a key.  It went from being a mild annoyance to a real pain in the neck (ie, major blocks of code would vanish in emacs or I wouldn’t be able to read sections of my inbox in mutt).  After a lot of searching, I think I’ve found the bug that I’ve been experiencing.

Apparently, the problem is related to something to the Nvidia “powermizer”, which by default forces the video card into a lower performance mode.  I don’t really care all that much about my framerates.  What I am concerned about is being able to see the text in my windows.  It would appear that the problem has been discussed quite a bit on the forums and the following changes appear to have fixed the problem.  It would also appear that the developers are working on a beta driver that addresses the problem.  Until then, the following seems to have taken care of the problem, which makes me immensely happy.

sudo cat > /etc/modprobe.d/nvidia << "EOF"
options nvidia NVreg_RegistryDwords="PerfLevelSrc=0x2222"
options nvidia NVreg_Mobile=1
EOF

Thanks to pauljohn32 on the Ubuntu bug listing for his solution.

.Xdefaults Configuration

Xft.dpi:                96
Xft.antialias:          true
Xft.hinting:            true
Xft.hintstyle:          hintslight

XTerm*faceName:         Liberation Mono
XTerm*faceSize:         11

xterm*saveLines:        10000
xterm*scrollBar:        false
xterm*rightScrollBar:   false
xterm*jumpScroll:       true
xterm*cursorColor:      blue
xterm*colorBDMode:      false
xterm*highlightColor:   darkgray
xterm*activeIcon:       false
xterm*scrollTtyOutput:  false
xterm*scrollKey:        true
xterm*Background:       white
xterm*Foreground:       black

Here’s a section of my .Xdefaults file to make xterm a bit more easy to read and disable some of the defaults that I find more or less annoying.

Hello world!

This is a blog for Linux related hacks and solutions, mostly configuration and scripts that I’ve found useful.  It’s always hard for me to remember things that I’ve done, so this is a way for me to keep a better record of how I’ve fixed problems in the past.  Hopefully, some of it will be helpful to others.