Strange monitor lines [advice request]

skottish · 2008-02-01 19:27:18

I'm getting strange RGB vertical lines on my monitor that come and go less than daily. These lines are effected by the on screen windows; They actually arc around whatever is on the screen. And screen shots don't pick them up. My gut instinct tells me that it's the video card going bad. I hope so anyway; The monitor was purchased new around month ago, and it wasn't cheap. The video card is a nVidia 7600GT and has functioned perfectly with the current drivers from extra since they were released. I don't have another machine with digital outputs to give an honest monitor test, and even if I did, predicting when the lines come could require days of operation. Does anyone have any thoughts on how to troubleshoot this problem?

schivmeister · 2008-02-01 19:45:50

it would be best to take a screenshot at the point of incidence

skottish · 2008-02-01 19:49:31

Screen shots while it was happening did not show the lines.

schivmeister · 2008-02-01 20:17:57

my bad, didn't notice that sentence in your first post. do you have a spare monitor or graphics card to test? From experience, this does happen, even with new monitors, and changing graphics hardware did not remove it. But I have only seen small traces, and not entirely sure it's exactly what you're describing.

wuischke · 2008-02-01 21:03:39

I had something similar with some versions of the intel driver, too.

I had one line in the lower right part, which would move to the lower right part once I moved a window over the line. The line displayed something like a clone of the window content to the left, but only on the thin line.
Curiously this line would disappear once I changed the resolution to 1280x800 (1680x1050 is the monitors native resolutions) and it wouldn't appear everytime I reboot the machine.

I never gave this issue much thought and haven't found the reason for this. It's just like my 11a iwl3945-issue: A bad thing, but not bad enough to spend a lot of time trying to resolve it. (because 11g works well)

skottish · 2008-02-02 04:00:01

I discovered something strange. The fancy lines come in when Thunar/gamin are in "runaway process mode". The lines came back as soon as Thunar locked up. I started up conky and confirmed 100% usage on core one, opened a terminal, killall Thunar, and the lines stopped. I tried some video encoding to get core one to 100% and everything went smoothly like always. I'm currently trying to get Thunar to lock up in just the right way to see if I can reproduce the same results. (The right way meaning 100% processor power. Getting Thunar to lock up is extremely easy. Maybe I should reinstall fam in order to double the crashes for testing purposes!)

--EDIT--

Pure luck. It happened again without any recent Thunar activity. Hopefully the new video card resolves the issue. If not, it's an excellent upgrade anyhow!

Last edited by skottish (2008-02-03 03:01:58)

eazy · 2008-02-05 17:26:36

The same thing is happening to me with a Radeon Mobility U1 (latest xf86-video-ati driver).

I never seen that on Ubuntu and when I switched to Arch Linux.
It happened the first time some days ago (driver version 6.7.195-3) and I hadn't touched the Xorg.conf file. I upgraded to 6.7.197-2 and it's still happening, at least once a day.

I'd say that this is started when I've enabled the [testing] repo and I've installed the 2.6.24 kernel.
As soon as I have the time to test, I'll report the results there.

skottish · 2008-02-05 17:35:17

I believe that it has something to do with xorg-server, but I have no way to prove it. I replaced my video card and it hasn't happened again, but there was a xorg-server upgrade that happened on my system (from testing).

There's another thread here (http://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=43435) that I've been seeing also for a while. Just for a split second sometimes when opening windows I see little distortions. I wasn't sure at first if it was simple E17 or something else. I'm sure now that they are related.

eazy · 2008-02-06 09:37:48

Heheheh... I am sure that this is not related to the latest xorg-server upgrade, at least from my side, but I can't prove it neither

The fact is that I remember hoping that the update of xorg-server would have fixed the glitch, but no way.

Hope this evening I can test the fallback kernel. By the way, who's running with the [testing] kernel?

eazy · 2008-02-06 09:43:11

Sorry disregard the latest message, it's plain wrong.

I've downgraded to xorg-server-1.4.0.90-5 and I'll see if it changes.

eazy · 2008-02-06 14:38:31

Ok, on my Ati Radeon Mobility U1 this is happening either with xorg-server 1.4.0.90-5 and 1.4.0.90-6 (latest).

Any clues?

Arch Linux

#1 2008-02-01 19:27:18

Strange monitor lines [advice request]

#2 2008-02-01 19:45:50

Re: Strange monitor lines [advice request]

#3 2008-02-01 19:49:31

Re: Strange monitor lines [advice request]

#4 2008-02-01 20:17:57

Re: Strange monitor lines [advice request]

#5 2008-02-01 21:03:39

Re: Strange monitor lines [advice request]

#6 2008-02-02 04:00:01

Re: Strange monitor lines [advice request]

#7 2008-02-05 17:26:36

Re: Strange monitor lines [advice request]

#8 2008-02-05 17:35:17

Re: Strange monitor lines [advice request]

#9 2008-02-06 09:37:48

Re: Strange monitor lines [advice request]

#10 2008-02-06 09:43:11

Re: Strange monitor lines [advice request]

#11 2008-02-06 14:38:31

Re: Strange monitor lines [advice request]

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