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Kiki the Gecko

Member

Registered: 2009-12-22

Posts: 6

graphic glitches in X with ATI card (+ strange log)

Hello there, I am encountering the following problem:

When I startup my notebook (IBM Thinkpad T41) and log in to my Openbox, everything is fine. But after a while, the fonts begin to deform. Usually that starts in Firefox or Evince or programs like that (so not in terminals), characters disappear or seem to be broken (which affects all "r"s, "o"s or "f"s, so I get the impression that the entire font set gets broken), icons and other window elements follow. This also occurs on terminals and even on my desktop background (see screenshot). While I use my system this phenomenon starts slowly and then becomes worse and worse until I cannot read anything and reboot with frustration. I have the impression that desktop switching speeds the whole process up.

I have talked about this issue with some people. One said I should check my RAM, because he heard of a similar problem which was caused by malfunctioning RAM. So I ran memtest, but no errors showed up. My own assumption is that the ATI driver (I have a Radeon Mobility 9200) does not work properly. I searched a bit in the forums and found someone with a similar problem. But after that person changed to the opensource ATI driver, everything was fine again. I never used another driver than the xf86-video-ati. The proprietary driver does not support my card so there is no other alternative than this one

I recently had a look in my Xorg.log and I found some strange entries. First, a vesa driver (I don't remeber installing it) is loaded but then discarded. But what is even more strange: There are pages of allocation errors! I have pasted it here: http://pastebin.ca/1723674

This is my screendhot after ~2hrs uptime:

EDIT: This appears neither in Windows (XP Professional) nor in the "real" consoles (Ctrl+Alt+F1 and so).

Last edited by Kiki the Gecko (2009-12-22 13:48:23)

Szelek

Member

From: Warsaw

Registered: 2008-09-03

Posts: 86

Re: graphic glitches in X with ATI card (+ strange log)

http://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=83728&p=1

Kiki the Gecko

Member

Registered: 2009-12-22

Posts: 6

Re: graphic glitches in X with ATI card (+ strange log)

Thank you, I've had a look there and experimented a bit with KMS and so on. I'll post there, so this thread can be closed.