My homebuilt PC's Radeon card died on me a week ago, probably because of the cold, going by the winter behaviour of a couple of laptops here over the years. I had a couple of days' struggle trying to get its built-in onboard nVidia going - it uses the discontinued 304 driver which my distro, Debian, dispensed with last edition. So I have installed Debian 9 Xfce and despite quite a stressful-feeling bunch of hours things are mostly fine. When I open Firefox most noticeably the window flashes to black first, and there are a couple of other glitchy-looking things, nothing as bad as with the Nouveau driver using Debian 10 or 9. (Synaptic also - both I think being two of the few applications I have that use a gtk3 theme, where I've selected the gtk2 theme Mist). I've looked at the 304 driver's UI and it's a pretty bland set of settings really, whereas my Intel-based laptops have three or so settings that can make a difference, like 'Triplebuffer' and 'DRI'.

I've paused from using Redshift also as with the nVidia driver it's either weirdly bright cursors all day or software cursors that freeze badly and vanish. Redshift has been a godsend for someone who has slept badly for years the card may still get replaced later.

This is a GeForce 7025/ nForce 630a. I might even have had this machine a decade now, and parts of it go back fourteen years. The Asus card that died was its newest part. As a non-gamer using a fairly light version of Linux nothing otherwise about this computer bothers me, so if anyone is running this driver and knows it and its issues well I wouldn't mind seeing for example the relevant part of your xorg.conf or anything else that might help.

(from inxi)

Graphics: Card: NVIDIA C61 [GeForce 7025 / nForce 630a]
bus-ID: 00:0d.0 chip-ID: 10de:03d6
Display Server: X.Org 1.19.2 driver: nvidia
Resolution: 1920x1080@60.00hz
GLX Renderer: GeForce 7025 / nForce 630a/integrated/SSE2
GLX Version: 2.1.2 NVIDIA 304.137 Direct Rendering: Yes

(the relevant bit of a so far probably unnecessary xorg.conf)

Section "Device"
Identifier "Card0"
Driver "nvidia"
BusID "PCI:0:13:0"
EndSection

Maybe things are as good as they get, if so then fine. It's old and cheap and the glitches are momentary signs of this, not deal-breaker-level. On the other hand a line or two to the configuration might show that there was just something to attend to.

Thanks in advance.

That appears to be integrated graphics on the mobo. Nvidia no longer supports devices of that age and while it may be possible to baby it along and keep going for a while it seems more beneficial to me if you were to purchase a newer machine (many available for ~$500 here in the US) for graphics and relegate that one to the non-graphical world. Bestbuy.com has several in the $300 - $600 price range while a reasonably decent replacement video card is difficult to find for <$150 even on ebay.

^ while I'd also recommend getting a new machine altogether, that might not be an option for OP.
Hoever, it is possible to get a much faster & still supported dedicated GPU for a fraction of that price.

See if including nouveau.noaccel=1 on the linux command line helps. I use it with my C61 and the upstream default DDX (modesetting):

Nvidia has not supported that for years. It won't multi thread.

Your options are nouveau. Or use 304 with an older version of xorg.

https://nouveau.freedesktop.org/CodeNames.html
https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/drivers/unix/legacy-gpu/
https://nvidia.custhelp.com/app/answ...ail/a_id/3142/

Nouveau will work but you may need to run some software with -disable-gpu to keep from having lock ups.

I had one of those from 2007, AthlonX2 3000, it finally died last year.

...or upstream default: Modesetting. https://www.linuxquestions.org/quest...-primer-38306/

The weather? You're not leaving your systems outside, are you? [grin]

FYI: NewEgg is currently selling GT 710 cards for ~$60---pretty inexpensive and much faster than the 7025. Fortunately, even though it came out just a year after the 7025, nVidia says it's supported using the 460.39 driver. For how long is anyone's guess.

Aside: A pox on all the bitcoin miners. Even graphics cards released a few years ago have just about doubled in price since mid-January. And that's if they're even in stock. A bad bit of timing for my ancient (circa 2014Q3) GeForce 210 to go unsupported. My budget wound up being only about half what I would need now for the AMD card I was interested in and only enough for an nVidia card with half the horsepower (but still tons faster than the 210).

Good luck with your replacement project...

Some houses' climates are affected by the seasons. Think old wooden house (breathing) with wood burners.

It's not a well-made home - I could almost be outside. What the place has done to my innards and guitars is much worse.

I can get used to the glitches I think then, for now, if there are no tweaks to be made. Being someone who's used budget laptops so long having left this machine alone for some time is a bit of a baffling waste and it does have some sentimental value for a few good reasons.

It does seem interesting to me that the black flashes seem related to gtk3 though, and that the symptom is most severe with Adwaita, more visible than Greybird, Arc etc. If Firefox and Synaptic were using gtk2 I'd still be finding my 4G dongle is the weak link and bottleneck and wouldn't have noticed anything conceivably broken.

The many consequences of my health-related poverty are more than bearable as someone not vain about my belongings. I suppose I've had a nearly academic interest in whether this glitch can be lessened and regarding the nature of it. So [placeholder for Jerry Springer-style summation].