Even more Ubuntu trouble : during the upgrade to Karmic, my wife wanted to check her email, switched to another user, and thereby forced the half-upgraded X-server to crash. Wonderfully, the upgrade process kept continuing, but off course I had to kill the ucf dialog processes the upgrade displays at the end of the upgrade. My Grub config and printer definitions were foobarred, but worse off all, my NVidia desktop experience was pure hell : X is slow as a dog, and using Firefox feels like steering a 1000 ton cargo vessel.


It is painfully to track the reason of the lag : upgrading to the latest NVidia drivers didn't solved anything (and removed half of my KDE setup), and reverting to an older Linux kernel gave the same experience. Even ditching NVidia, and using the nv driver seems also slowing the system down. Trying different options in the xorg.conf file was futile (disabling AGP solves *something*), but I'm still in the dark about the true reason of the performance drain, and even worse, there's no solution in sight. From the logs, it seems that 3D is b0rken, but why & how is still unclear.

(II) NVIDIA(0): NVIDIA 3D Acceleration Architecture Initialized

(==) NVIDIA(0): Disabling shared memory pixmaps

(II) NVIDIA(0): Using the NVIDIA 2D acceleration architecture

Sigh...


Update : downgraded to nvidia-glx-173. Much better now !