Well, after a month on using this Asus Laptop N73SV there are some issues with it.
The first one, and I’m not sure if it’s a driver issue or just a plain hardware issue is that the external connected monitor was working fine, and then started to have a blue tint and now it has a green tint. So first I wonder if the VGA cable or the monitor itself was bad, but replacing it by another same monitor brand and model and different VGA cable, it has shown the same issues. So Ok, it’s a laptop issue that some HP owners are also having… Just search for HP an video tint… Removing the battery and power, waiting some time, and booting up with the external monitor, even the ASUS logo is tinted… So it’s not a K/Ubuntu issue. Solution? None so far. I have to try with a different monitor/and cable namely HDMI.
The second part of this post related with the video issues that I have is due to the fact that this N73SV has dual cards: an Intel i915 and NVidia GT540M. While trying to debug the above issue, I ended up with no desktop effects on KDE KDM by messing around with the desktop effects options… Whatever I did to enable them I was also greeted with the message that Effects couldn’t be enabled. So issue was related to the fact that the GLX libraries couldn’t be found/loaded… When running glxgears this error appear:
name of display: :0.0
Xlib: extension “GLX” missing on display “:0.0”.
Xlib: extension “GLX” missing on display “:0.0”.
The solution:
I’ve removed bumblebee and nvidia, which cleared the issue:
apt-get purge bumblebee
sudo apt-get purge nvidia*
apt-get install –reinstall xserver-xorg-video-intel libgl1-mesa-glx libgl1-mesa-dri xserver-xorg-core
dpkg-reconfigure xserver-xorg
reboot
And after this I could enable again Desktop effects but I was using the default Intel driver and the Nouveau driver.
Finally, I’ve installed again MrMee/Bumblebee, which by itself installed again the Nvidia drivers, and after that I could only boot into Recovery Mode, because a normal start wouldn’t give me the Kubuntu boot logo and at final boot stage I just had a black screen with an hanged computer…
This issue is due to the fact that the nouveau driver is/was enabled, and I had to disable it. I found no complete instructions for doing that, but these do work:
The nouveau driver needs to be disabled, by editing two files:
/etc/modprobe.d/blacklist.conf
Add at the end of this file the following line: blacklist nouveau
And then, the other file to edit it depends of your grub version. For Grub2 , there is the need to add the following to the file /etc/default/grub
GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT=”quiet splash pci=nomsi nouveau.blacklist=1”
And then run the command: update-grub2
On Grub1, just edit the menu.lst file and add the nouveau.blacklist=1 to yur booting kernel options, keeping in mind that after a kernel upgrade you need to blacklist the module again.
Booting up now with the Intel Driver and the Nvidia driver installed by Bumblebee should work.
Primal Cortex's Weblog 