Fixing nVidia Graphics Tearing on LinuxMint Cinnamon

So, after installing an nVidia GTX 650TI a while back, I put up with tearing in pretty much all applications because it was easy to install and get going.

But eventually I got sick of it and tried to fix it. After trying about every fix I could find, I jumped to a different distro (from Xubuntu 12.10 to Mint 15) in the hope that might have some effect. It didn't, but I re-tried a fix I thought I'd already tried, and found it eliminated the tearing 100%.

The fix is to add this to the /etc/environment file:

CLUTTER_PAINT=disable-clipped-redraws:disable-culling
CLUTTER_VBLANK=True

This is using the nVidia proprietary driver 304.88. Hope to confirm on other Xubuntu systems whether this fix also works.

Update 20 June 2013:

Unfortunately, the fix only seems to work in Mint/Cinnamon. Title updated to reflect this.

Fixing "mojo.run: No such file or directory" error

When trying to install something with a .mojo.run extension (for example, I was installing Dungeon Defenders from the Humble Bundle), if you get this error:

mojo.run: No such file or directory

The solution (thanks Kazade!) is to install the ia32-libs package. Then the installer should work.

(Posted this because it took me way too long searching to stumble across Kazade's post).

Update 20/10/2013:

I noticed that ia32-libs is no longer an installation target in 13.10. There doesn't seem to be an easy way to fix this, since some suggested mechanisms don't work when you've got a mojo.run file.

The only way I found to do it is detailed here: http://wiki.phoenixviewer.com/ia32-libs-in-ubuntu-13-10

The version of synaptic I was using was slightly different to that described above. In Step 4, it was "click New" rather than "other software -> add", and in step 5 the values to insert are in four separate lines:

• Dropdown box: Binary (deb)
• URI: http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/
• Distribution: raring
• Section(s): main restricted universe multiverse

Fix broken xfce4 desktop after uninstalling compiz

So, to test a theory on how to fix graphical tearing on a Xubuntu 12.04.1 install, I tried installing compiz.

Not only did it not help, but it also broke the desktop environment. So I uninstalled (followed the reverse of the compiz installation steps I did). Uninstalling though doesn't clean up everything, and the desktop was still broken.

Fortunately, I found this post which suggested removing ~/.config and ~/.cache.

You don't need to zap those entire directories though. Inside each one there is a subdirectory that starts with "compiz". Those are the directories that need deleting. After that, I rebooted and the regular xfce4 desktop was working again.