After weeks of playing with desktop settings and suffering from one pegged CPU in my quad-core work computers, I've figured out the problem and resolved it.
It turns out this is a known bug:
https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=204070
The solution is to not uncheck any of the items that appear in your System Tray. The System Tray is the panel area that holds icons for applications that don't show in your Task Manager. Mine holds a Pidgin icon, an Amarok icon, a KOrganizer icon, a managed network icon and a volume control icon.
I simply right clicked, selected System Tray Settings, and under Icons I checked all (four) checkboxes. Pressed OK and my CPU usage immediately dropped to < 5% for xorg and plasma-desktop.
Wednesday, March 17, 2010
Tuesday, March 2, 2010
Linux radeon video problems on Dell 2007WFP on DVI
I got a new work computer and instantly installed Kubuntu 9.10 x64 on it. I then proceeded to install the ATI drivers for the video card, an ATI Radeon HD 4350. I used the 10.1 Catalyst drivers and was not impressed. Xorg.conf constantly using 50% of one CPU, bad performance resizing and dragging windows, etc. Tried to upgrade to the 10.2 Catalyst and then KDE wouldn't even start up.
So I decide to return to the open source Radeon driver and ran into some problems in doing so. First I googled purging fglrx from my system and followed those instructions.
Next, I rebooted and got cloned screens. xrandr fixed that for me pretty quickly, but then I had weird video effects on my DVI monitor, a Dell 2007WPF. xrandr -q told me that it was running at 59.9hz, which is not the native resolution; the monitor wants 60hz
Here's how I fixed it.
1. Run cvt to generate timings for the monitor.
cvt 1680 1050 60
2. Create a new mode using the resulting timings passed to xrandr
xrandr --output DVI-0 --newmode dvi-calculated 146.25 1680 1784 1960 2240 1050 1053 1059 1089 -hsync +vsync
Note - The '--output DVI-0' is apparently ignored, resulting in the need for the following line.
3. Associate the new mode to the output using xrandr
xrandr --addmode DVI-0 dvi-calculated
4. Activate the new mode on the output using xrandr
xrandr --output DVI-0 --mode dvi-native
5. For me it didn't fix the problem. I actually had to switch to a different resolution mode, then back to the new mode I had created
xrandr --output DVI-0 --mode 1024x768
xrandr --output DVI-0 --mode dvi-calculated
And my artifacts were gone. I'm not sure if these configuration items will survive a reboot or not.
So I decide to return to the open source Radeon driver and ran into some problems in doing so. First I googled purging fglrx from my system and followed those instructions.
Next, I rebooted and got cloned screens. xrandr fixed that for me pretty quickly, but then I had weird video effects on my DVI monitor, a Dell 2007WPF. xrandr -q told me that it was running at 59.9hz, which is not the native resolution; the monitor wants 60hz
Here's how I fixed it.
1. Run cvt to generate timings for the monitor.
cvt 1680 1050 60
2. Create a new mode using the resulting timings passed to xrandr
xrandr --output DVI-0 --newmode dvi-calculated 146.25 1680 1784 1960 2240 1050 1053 1059 1089 -hsync +vsync
Note - The '--output DVI-0' is apparently ignored, resulting in the need for the following line.
3. Associate the new mode to the output using xrandr
xrandr --addmode DVI-0 dvi-calculated
4. Activate the new mode on the output using xrandr
xrandr --output DVI-0 --mode dvi-native
5. For me it didn't fix the problem. I actually had to switch to a different resolution mode, then back to the new mode I had created
xrandr --output DVI-0 --mode 1024x768
xrandr --output DVI-0 --mode dvi-calculated
And my artifacts were gone. I'm not sure if these configuration items will survive a reboot or not.
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