Disable Hardware acceleration on Gnome 3 or fix VNC

Question

I've just upgraded my openSUSE to 12.1, which ships with gnome3. Previously, I had gnome2 running with vino-server as a vnc server that starts upon login. With gnome3 this works too, but the vnc session itself is broken. Images / windows / fonts flicker or are only partially visible. I highly blame this on the 3D effects or 2D drawing animations, which are not very healthy for vnc.

What can be done to disable all these effects? Or is there a way to fix VNC?

Solution

If you want GNOME 3 to always be in the fallback mode (which AFAIK does not use 3D acceleration), then go to "System Settings", select "System Info", go to the "Graphics" tab and there enable "Forced Fallback Mode".

Comments

[Steve-o]

It's the ATI/AMD binary Xorg driver. Using the F/OSS version would be a suitable solution and you may get some acceleration with it.