I had become increasingly frustrated with the nVidia drivers on Ubuntu up to and including 8.10 ... but 8.10 is too damn buggy on my hardware. Last ditch effort was installing 173.14.12 via EnvyNG on Ubuntu 8.04 LTS and I still had a crappy flicker on both the laptop's LCD and my 22" HP w2207h LCD. I also suffered from the firefox issue you described ... which actually has nothing to do with firefox in particular, but that's neither here or there. :-) I just got done installing 180.29 and everything's brigher and sharper and my eyes already don't seem to be as stressed. Hopefully I can avoid the screen freezes experienced by all the 180.* users on the nVidia forums. :-P I've already determined I can't use an "visual effects", but that applied to previous nVidia drivers as well.<br>
<br>If anyone's interested, I basically followed this guide:<br><a href="https://help.ubuntu.com/community/NvidiaManual">https://help.ubuntu.com/community/NvidiaManual</a><br><br>Ubuntu 8.04 LTS on:<br><br>HP Pavilion dv9500 Laptop<br>
Video Card: GeForce 8400M GS<br><br>Now lets see if my dual-head nVidia workstation at home benefits from these new drivers!<br><br>-ken<br><br><br><div class="gmail_quote">On Wed, Mar 4, 2009 at 10:09 PM, Omar Chanouha <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:ofosho@gatech.edu">ofosho@gatech.edu</a>></span> wrote:<br>
<blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;">I don't know if this message will help anyone, but it may.<br>
<br>
If you happen to be running a desktop with nvidia drivers, and your<br>
distro does not automatically update you to the bleeding edge, ie.<br>
gentoo. Then you might want to consider getting the new 180.* series<br>
of drivers have resolved what I would consider a huge bug with<br>
firefox. Prior to updating, certain sites, gmail specifically, would<br>
scroll very slowly and hi-res flash videos were very choppy.<br>
<br>
You can get your current driver number from /proc/driver/nvidia/version<br>
<br>
and you can test your driver with this site:<br>
<br>
<a href="http://www.gatechdining.com/plans.html" target="_blank">http://www.gatechdining.com/plans.html</a><br>
<br>
Just go there and scroll up and down quickly, if it scrolls your good.<br>
If it freezes and your CPU jumps to 99%, your not so good.<br>
<br>
Hope that is not old news, and helps someone,<br>
<br>
-OFosho, Miami Dolphin and Relieved Nvidia User<br>
_______________________________________________<br>
Ale mailing list<br>
<a href="mailto:Ale@ale.org">Ale@ale.org</a><br>
<a href="http://mail.ale.org/mailman/listinfo/ale" target="_blank">http://mail.ale.org/mailman/listinfo/ale</a><br>
</blockquote></div><br>