The joys of Xorg and nVidia drivers

I just upgraded Xorg on my debian machine and most GTK 2 widgets lost their borders. How annoying. Turns out the latest xserver-xorg-video-nvidia driver isn’t compatible with the latest Xorg ABI but; this driver doesn’t tell you, a more recent version will complain:

================ WARNING WARNING WARNING WARNING ================
This server has a video driver ABI version of 11.0 that this
driver does not officially support. Please check
http://www.nvidia.com/ for driver updates or downgrade to an X
server with a supported driver ABI.
=================================================================
(WW) NVIDIA: The driver will continue to load, but may behave strangely.
(WW) NVIDIA: This driver was compiled against the X.Org server SDK from git commit b6c7b9b2f39e970cedb6bc1e073f901e28cb0fa3 and may not be compatible with the final version of this SDK.
(WW) NVIDIA: This server has an unsupported input driver ABI version (have 13.0, need < 13.0). The driver will continue to load, but may behave strangely.


The solution was to carefully downgrade xserver-xorg-core to 2:1.10.4-1 (that required downgrading xserver-xorg-input-evdev xserver-xorg-input-wacom too). Back with Xorg ABI 10 and everything works ! I now have border on my widgets !

sudo apt-get install xserver-xorg-core=2:1.10.4-1 xserver-xorg-input-evdev=1:2.6.0-2+b1 xserver-xorg-input-wacom=0.10.10+20110203-1)

Dual Layer AT91SAM9260 Board

Up until now I limited my self to text VFDs or LCDs with a common HD44780 interface but yesterday, I stumbled upon this nice PSP-LCD (LQ043T3DX02) for sell on SparkFun. Now I wanted to do graphics ! However you won’t display something on those LCDs with a PIC16F… (Well maybe a dual port memory with a CPLD to do the timings)

As my projects (Blamp and my active speakers) progress, I always find myself in need of a fast core with possibility of lots of expansion and that can be deeply embedded (read: no ports on the board). Here enters my efforts to have a working, dual-layer AT91SAM960 board with 256Mb RAM and a FPGA. oh and yes, it will run Linux.

Compiz + Virtualization FTW !

Windows, Mac OSX all running on a Linux host with super eye-candy !