Edit: The bug has been fixed in openSUSE update repository, you do not need to compile the driver manually anymore, just install the latest update for xorg-x11-driver-video package.)

I have upgraded my home PC to Intel i5-2500K CPU (Sandy Bridge family). The CPU has a new integrated graphics core (Intel HD 3000) and it works out-of-box in openSUSE-11.4 including 3D and composition. The only problem I noticed are broken popup menus and buttons in title bars in KDE. Esp. broken popups are very annoying as they are hardly usable, see e.g. https://bugs.freedesktop.org/attachment.cgi?id=45061.

Fortunately Intel has released updated X driver version 2.15 which fixes this problem. Here is a step by step how to install the updated driver in openSUSE 11.4.

  1. Install xorg-x11-server-sdk package sudo zypper in xorg-x11-server-sdk

  2. Download http://xorg.freedesktop.org/archive/individual/driver/xf86-video-intel-2.15.0.tar.bz2

  3. Unpack the archive tar xfjv xf86-video-intel-2.15.0.tar.bz2

  4. Now compile the driver: 
    cd xf86-video-intel-2.15.0
./configure --prefix=/usr --libdir=/usr/lib64
make

    (If you have installed 32-bit system then use /usr/lib path in the second command.)

  5. Install the driver (will overwrite the files from RPM package) sudo make install
  6. Restart the X server (simply relogin to a new session)

Voila, now your system should use the new driver and the artifacts in the KDE popups should be gone!

Maybe someone can pack the driver into a RPM package in the openSUSE build service, but for me this solution is sufficient…