Upgrading Intel video drivers for Xubuntu 13.04

26 August 2013

Having purchased a refurbished ThinkPad X301 this month, I set about installing Xubuntu 13.04. So far, the only problem I have had was with the Intel video drivers. I was seeing some screen corruption, especially with rxvt:

Example of screen corruption with `urxvt`

FreeDesktop's bug tracker confirmed that I wasn't alone in having the problem, and this post explains how I fixed it.

aptitude purge xserver-xorg-video-all: This is a metapackage that depends upon video drivers for all supported chipsets. You can safely uninstall it without uninstalling all the chipset drivers.
Download the latest driver source: Fetch the xf86-video-intel archive from the XOrg archives; as of August 2013, the latest version is 2.21.15.
Install a toolchain: If you don't already have them, you will need to aptitude install build-essential xserver-xorg-dev
./configure && make && make install: Installs the Intel video driver into /usr/local. However, X11 does not scan this path by default¹.
aptitude purge xserver-xorg-video-intel: Removes the older, packaged version of the driver
ln -s /usr/local/lib/xorg/modules/drivers/intel_drv.so /usr/lib/xorg/modules/drivers/: Symlinks the driver into a path where X11 can discover it
Restart X11: Drop to a tty with ctrl-alt-f1 and service lightdm restart

¹ If anyone knows how to persuade X11 to search /usr/local/lib/xorg, tell me how in the comments.

The screen corruption bug should be fixed in Ubuntu 13.10 since it will include a more recent driver version.