BrainOut!
The mumblings of a Christian autistic husband, dad, IT guy and amateur radio operator - Will Brokenbourgh / AF7EC
[SOLVED] Intel 82865 video / graphics performance slow on Debian Linux (Squeeze)
Poor DuckDuckGo, they probably had enough of my searching for 'slow intel video debian' and what-not, and I was growing exhausted at seeing the same answers to my problems, and those answers *not* working.
Well kiddies, if you've got a vintage Intel integrated video system on your motherboard and think dragging a window or scrolling shouldn't look like it's on a Molasses Crystal Display in Debian Squeeze (and possibly others), here's what I did to fix it...
(the following works for x386, but I'm not sure if it works for amd64. Your mileage will undoubtedly vary. This is with *no* xorg.conf file in /etc/X11)
• Go to /usr/lib/xorg/modules/drivers and rename the
intel_drv.so driver to something else (add a 0 or something to the front of the
filename, etc)
• Download and extract the following file into the 'drivers'
folder mentioned above:
intel_drv.so.zip
• Log out, then back in, then drag a window around to see if it fixed the problem.
If it didn't work, I'm sorry. If it did work, Yay! I had such mind-numbingly sluggish 2D graphics performance in Debian Squeeze that I was getting mad about it. I mean, good grief, the Linux people always refer to Windows as a 'legacy OS', but that legacy OS handles the Intel graphics card just fine compared to the latest Debian release! Hopefully this driver swap will help someone with the same problem...and monkeying around with (or creating) an xorg.conf file is not necessary.
Be aware that if this file is replaced during an update, you'll probably experience awful video performance again, so keep the downloaded file handy so you can perform this replacement after the update. If you're the curious type, the Intel driver I have available for download is from Ubuntu 10.04 LTS. I don't know how long you can keep using this driver, but since the current kernel in Debian is a bit stale compared to the Ubuntu 10.04 LTS, you might have a while. Who knows for sure...??