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Display works well with Ubuntu 19.10 and nouveau drivers with GeForce 7800 GT but when I upgraded to Ubuntu 20.04 the desktop works very weird, if I have two windows open or some window is not full screen it is disrupted badly.

But if I use for example Chrome on full screen it works fine and videos etc are displayed correctly.

I tried to go to use Nvidia drivers but it seems that this graphic card is so old that Nvidia ones are not available for Ubuntu 20.04.

Then I tried to install Kubuntu since I suspect that going up in Gnome version to version GNOME 3.36 in 20.04 could use some HW accelerations which are not working correctly with my graphic card. Kubuntu seems to have even more problems with my display so I removed it and since in Ubuntu 20.04 the display was so badly disrupted I installed again Ubuntu 19.10 and display is again working fine.

So something between 19.10 -> 20.04 causes that with GeForce 7800GT using nouveau drivers makes screen disruptions.

Are there some HW accelerations used by Gnome 3.36 which I could disable or should I try somehow GNOME 3.34 which is used in 19.10? Or are there maybe some updates in nouveau graphic driver which can cause my problems?

My graphics info now from 19.10 but 20.04 it were similar but display has lot of problems:

sudo lshw -class display
  *-display                 
       description: VGA compatible controller
       product: G70 [GeForce 7800 GT]
       vendor: NVIDIA Corporation
       physical id: 0
       bus info: pci@0000:01:00.0
       version: a1
       width: 64 bits
       clock: 33MHz
       capabilities: pm msi pciexpress vga_controller bus_master cap_list rom
       configuration: driver=nouveau latency=0
       resources: irq:51 memory:fd000000-fdffffff memory:c0000000-cfffffff memory:fc000000-fcffffff ioport:e000(size=128) memory:c0000-dffff

1 Answer 1

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Have you tried downloading the driver directly from NVIDIA's website and installing it?

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  • I tried also that but without success. It requires that I uninstall nouveau before I can use Nvidia driver and I tried to use modbprobe things to disable nouveau without success. Also it seems that this Nvidia is depending on some 386-packets I assume that it can have problems in Ubuntu 20.04 - if it has no problem I assumed that it would be available in driver ppa. I'm also wondering why to go to Nvidia drivers since nouveau has been working in Ubuntu 19.10 enough good but now in 20.04 its not working. I can still try to use Nvidia ones, could you give working guidance for that?
    – tvirrann
    May 25, 2020 at 8:34
  • I managed to blacklist nouveau and now its some kind of VGA-mode and tried in Ubuntu 20.04 sudo sh ./NVIDIA-Linux-x86_64-304.137.run It needs some packets which I got using apt-get install but it ends up error make[3]: *** No rule to make target 'arch/x86/tools/relocs_32.c', needed by 'arch/x86/tools/relocs_32.o'. Stop. Are there some way to continue build or some way how nouveau can be used like in Ubuntu 19.10?
    – tvirrann
    May 25, 2020 at 18:50
  • Looks like it choked at building the 32-bit parts. You might need to add the i386 architecture to your system: sudo dpkg --add-architecture i386
    – wyphan
    May 29, 2020 at 17:40
  • This command seems to do nothing on Ubuntu 20.04, I check release notes and it is said that i386 architecture support has been removed intentionally. So bad if this also causes that users having old Nvidia card can't use Ubuntu any more. I need to consider move to Win10 after using Ubuntu more than ten years since it has dropped support of old HW
    – tvirrann
    Jun 7, 2020 at 8:14
  • 1
    Ubuntu dropped support for 304 drivers since version 16.04 ubuntuforums.org/…
    – gimmegimme
    Nov 19, 2022 at 13:16

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