Tearing with the Dell Latitude E6420 with the nVidia NVS4200M

Support & Help Requests Hardware
1

Hi all,
I have been in love with Ubuntu MATE since its inception with the PPA in 14.04, but I have been plagued by a persistent problem with my hardware. Tearing.
My laptop is:
Dell Latitude E6420
Core i5-2540M Dual Core clocked at 2.6GHz
8GB ram
nVidia 4200M 1Gb
128GB SATAIII SSD

It’s nothing to thumb your nose at, but I understand she’s not brand new. I loaded Windows 10 on a second drive and everything is so flawless that I’m seriously considering switching back. My only hope is that someone here in the forums can rescue me and pull me back to MATE. I’ve tried Compton with no success.

Please help.

Thank you,
-Pete

2

Hi Peter

There has been a ton of changes since that ppa. I would suggest going with the latest and greatest, Ubuntu Mate 16.04. Download the live installer.

https://ubuntu-mate.org/xenial/

3

v3xx,
I appreciate the comment. I gave 16.04 and the nVidia 361 driver on Tuesday and it was still tearing. I wanted to see if the community had any ideas to try out.

Thank you,
-Pete

4

Have you tried compiz?

Edit:
Found this related to tearing.
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/xorg-server/+bug/1278012/comments/12

5

Hi @Peter_Misik,

try dropping down a version with the following terminal (Ctrl + Alt + t) command (if you indeed still have the 361 package installed!):

sudo apt-get remove nvidia-361 && sudo apt-get install nvidia-352

and restart after running command!.

I hope it helps!. :smiley:

6

I have troubles with screen tearing on Linux too, but I found that the Marco (Compton GPU compositor) works flawlessly. Might want to give it a shot before going back to windows spyware. I know you said you tried Compton, but this is different than the regular WM. It’s in the MATE Tweak menu.

2 Likes
7

What @Justin said, that’s why Compton and Compiz are included :slight_smile:️

1 Like