Textless Menu "buttons" - Precise561 & Slacko55 - SOLVED

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wimpy
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Joined: Wed 22 Aug 2012, 10:30
Location: Essex, UK

Textless Menu "buttons" - Precise561 & Slacko55 - SOLVED

#1 Post by wimpy »

I'be been re-comissioning an old Abit KV7 mobo (which I thought was dead but was only lying doggo- Sorry). Anyway. both Slacko 5.5 and Precise 5.6.1 start up fine from their isos and the desktop icons and text are OK; but, when I click on the Menu "button", all I get is the grey button lists without text. It's as if the menu text font colour is being set to the same as the background. Luckily, I know where the poweroff button should be and it works if I click that anonymous button. To be fair, Slacko did provide text on a few of the group buttons (on one occasion) but the rest of the group buttons were greyed out, as were all the subgroup buttons.
Any help or suggestions would be appreciated.
PS An old wary works OK.
Last edited by wimpy on Thu 11 Jul 2013, 06:34, edited 1 time in total.

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OscarTalks
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#2 Post by OscarTalks »

Is this an nVidia graphics card by any chance?
If so, try booting with puppy pfix=ram nouveau.noaccel=1
or possibly puppy pfix=ram nouveau.modeset=0
Oscar in England
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wimpy
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#3 Post by wimpy »

Thanks for the reply. The incantation puppy pfix=ram nouveau.noaccel=1 worked fine for both Precise and Slacko. I guess it must be a Nvidia card - possibly an old 5700LE (I can remember retiring one, back in the past).
What exactly does the incantation do?
LxXenial16.08, LxPupSc17.07.01,Lucid 5.2.8 and others - all frugal

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OscarTalks
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#4 Post by OscarTalks »

There is a bug with the nouveau driver and certain nVidia cards. It is fixed in some of the very recent kernels. Wary doesn't have nouveau at all and loads nv or vesa instead. I believe the option instructs nouveau to load in a slightly different mode. Acceleration is backed off but at least all the graphics display properly.

If creating a save-file or installing you can edit the file /etc/modprobe.d/nouveau.conf to read options nouveau noaccel=1 so nouveau will load like this in all future boots (Note that this is now a space - not a dot - between nouveau and noaccel). Really though the best solution is to install the proprietary nVidia driver.
Oscar in England
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wimpy
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#5 Post by wimpy »

I tried to install a couple of pets of nvidia official drivers. They didn't work -presumably because they were compiled for a different kernel. I seem to remember that there was an xorgwizard of a different flavour in Precise, which gave more driver options. I couldn't find them so I'm stuck with nv which works, for now.
LxXenial16.08, LxPupSc17.07.01,Lucid 5.2.8 and others - all frugal

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