A flurry of posts tonight it seems. But, I want to get down all the "gotcha's" I've been having fun with in setting up the new desktop and server.
Quick background. I pulled the hard drive from my old desktop computer and installed in my new desktop computer. You can read my previous posts to see what I did with the server.
For the desktop one of the biggest changes was the video card. The old box had an nVidia 7600 series PCI-E card. The new box has an integrated Intel GMA X4500 video card. (I know, shared RAM for video sucks, but I have 4GB on the box and run 64bit Linux so memory shouldn't be a problem.) All the hardware was properly detected - including the new Intel video card. But, 3D acceleration refused to work.
When I booted up, Ubuntu complained that the video cards had changed. Then asked if I wanted to remove the nVidia drivers. I said yes of course. But the video was still working in a slow, 2D only manner. The usual tool "glxgears" wouldn't even run to tell me how much 3D acceleration I was getting.
The solution turns out to be obvious, in hindsight. The nVidia driver (aka kernel module) was removed. However none of the other nVidia specific packages were removed - including nvidia-glx. Removing ALL things nVidia and restarting cleared up the problem for me. Here's how:
aptitude search nvidia #make note of all the packages that have an "i" in the left hand column. These are installed and need to be removed. sudo apt-get remove XXXX XXXX XXXX #where the XXXX's are the names of the all the installed packages.
Once that is done, restart the computer. Things should "just work". If not, make sure you have the "xserver-xorg-video-intel" package installed. This is normally installed by default though.