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Fix graphic errors after replacing NVIDIA card with Intel Graphics

September 7, 2014
[howto] [gnu/linux] [xorg] [hardware]

After upgrading motherboard and its components, regular graphics (windows, video) worked fine with Intel HD Graphics, but trying to run something like glxgears displayed nothing but blank window. It was strange as Intel drivers are open source and known for their good work in GNU/Linux.

It took me a while to find this long thread, which helped diagnosing the issue. I won’t repeat it, so if you need help grabbing useful information from logs or anything similar go read it.

In short, list of issues I encountered includes:

  • glxgears displaying huge number of frames, like
     5205 frames in 5.0 seconds = 1040.517 FPS
    

    (possible as nothing was actually drawn/displayed).

  • xdriinfo saying:
     xdriinfo: libGL is too old
    

    .

  • Something like Failed to load NV-GLX.
  • Several more, which I don’t remember.

The solution turned out to be quite simple, although not very obvious:

  1. Remove NVIDIA drivers, e.g. run as root
    ./NVIDIA-Linux-x86_64-304.88.run --uninstall
    

    Surprised there is such an option? Try passing -A (--advanced-options) to the installer to see whole list.

  2. Reinstall MESA. Why? Because NVIDIA installer replaces some libraries with its own versions, which breaks graphic subsystem for other graphic cards.