Screen artifacts with intel video cards in Salix 13.0

Unfortunately, no single version of the intel drivers that come with the latest Xorg versions supports all intel graphics cards properly. So, if you have an intel graphics card and you experience problems while displaying graphics, anything from mouse cursor flickering to problems displaying system tray icons or desktop icons, what you might need to fix it is to try another version of the intel drivers.

Installing a different version of the driver

If you open gslapt and do a search for xf86-video-intel, you'll find that there are many different versions available in the repository. You can try replacing your current version with another one. You will have to exit Xorg and restart it for the changes to take effect. Try them one by one until you get one that works right for your hardware, there will certainly be one, but which one exactly depends on your specific model.

You can also do the same using slapt-get instead of gslapt. You can use:

slapt-get --search xf86-video-intel

to list all available driver packages, and then for example:

slapt-get --reinstall -i xf86-video-intel-2.5.1-i486-1

to replace your installed driver with the exact version you'll get from the previous search command.

Disable driver updates

The latest version of the driver is installed by default, but if you replace that with an older version, the one that works better for you, salix-update-notifier (if you have it installed) will keep informing you of possible package upgrades, and running slapt-get --upgrade will always try to upgrade the driver to the latest version. To avoid that, just add xf86-video-intel in the list of excluded packages. You can do that with gslapt, by navigating to Preferences menu/Exclude tab and adding it there, or straight in /etc/slapt-get/slapt-getrc by editing the EXCLUDE line (which uses a comma-separated list) with your favorite text editor.