Debian 9 running without video hardware

Slacker9000 · 10-31-2017, 02:26 PM

I recently installed Debian 9 on my Hp Pavilion g6 laptop. I chose to go with cinnamon as my gui. every time I login I have a message that pops up saying
Cinnamon is currently running without video hardware acceleration and, as a result, you may observe much higher than normal CPU usage.
There could be a problem with your drivers or some other issue. For the best experience, it is recommended that you only use this mode for troubleshooting purposes.
Any advice helps thanks

wpeckham · 10-31-2017, 02:44 PM

#1 help may not really be required. I have had laptops with non-supported video that worked just fine for months, as long as I ignored that message.

#2 you will have to investigate and report the REAL video in that laptop, and the video DETECTED by the kernel. If you have the wrong driver, we may be able to direct you to a better one, but not blindly.

Most of those had INTEL HD 3000 video controllers. FOR decent support on Linux you had to have the latest Intel firmware updates. I do not have such a laptop handy at this time, so I have limited resources for checking.

IsaacKuo · 10-31-2017, 06:07 PM

Cinnamon is unlike other desktop environments because it more or less requires hardware acceleration. There is no option to turn off compositing special effects and such.

Personally, I prefer XFCE4.

You can determine what graphics hardware is involved with the command "lspci". Post the output of "lspci" here, and we can get it up and running.

jefro · 10-31-2017, 08:57 PM

Hello and welcome to LQ.

As others have noted it and I agree that it has something to do with video. Either you don't have the correct drivers to support video which Cinnamon requires (maybe 3d) or you don't have a card for it or maybe some setting is to blame. Maybe bios or even grub. Guess it could be some feature not fully starting up. A lot of web pages on it.

Guess it will help to start by IDing the driver and board and features. lspci is one noted above and I think inxi (?)

IsaacKuo · 11-01-2017, 10:09 AM

Anyway, I think this laptop model has an Intel graphics chip (without extra complications such as hybrid graphics). If so, then the way to get hardware acceleration working could be:

1) Add "contrib non-free" to lines in /etc/apt/sources.list, so it looks like:

Code:

# deb cdrom:[Debian GNU/Linux 9.0.0 _Stretch_ - Official i386 NETINST 20170617-14:23]/ stretch main

#deb cdrom:[Debian GNU/Linux 9.0.0 _Stretch_ - Official i386 NETINST 20170617-14:23]/ stretch main

deb http://ftp.us.debian.org/debian/ stretch main contrib non-free
deb-src http://ftp.us.debian.org/debian/ stretch main contrib non-free

deb http://security.debian.org/debian-security stretch/updates main contrib non-free
deb-src http://security.debian.org/debian-security stretch/updates main contrib non-free

# stretch-updates, previously known as 'volatile'
deb http://ftp.us.debian.org/debian/ stretch-updates main contrib non-free
deb-src http://ftp.us.debian.org/debian/ stretch-updates main contrib non-free

2) run the following commands:

Code:

su -
apt-get update
apt-get dist-upgrade
apt-get install firmware-linux-nonfree

There may be GUI ways to do this with the GUI update manager, but I'm not familiar with it. I always use the command line tools because they make it easy for me to remotely administer all of my computers from one place via (text based) ssh and copy/paste.