Sudden OpenGL Corruption of X

[Venner]

Ok, here's one that has me going crazy today.

I've been running Kubuntu Feisty just fine on my laptop for several months. I use it daily for class and whatnot. Starting this morning, I've been experiencing intermittent video corruption in X. (Lines, outlines of windows after I minimize them left behind, general almost moireeing of my background image, etc.) It seems to only happen after my OpenGL screensaver (any of them) has come on, and it requires a cold reboot to get rid of it. (Warm reboot, the dell boot logo was also screwed up.)

Now, I'm a bit perplexed because I have done nothing to change my system configuration in the past couple of weeks. I let Adept-Update install three upgrades this morning, which I believe were for k3b, libk3b, and ...something else that I can't recall at the moment (whatever was new this morning) but which shouldn't have anything to do with the video.

Has anyone else experienced this or have any idea what may be causing it?
Might it be a hardware failure even? (I hope not.)

Dell Inspiron 5150*
ATI Mobility 9000 video


*I'm well aware of the issues and the class action suit surrounding the 5150 model. My laptop had the mainboard and LCD panel both replaced a couple of years ago, and the new parts work fine.

[SheeEttin]

Re: Sudden OpenGL Corruption of X

Hmm...
I have no idea what could cause this. Since it seems that the OpenGL screensaver causes it, perhaps you should choose a different screensaver?

[Venner]

Re: Sudden OpenGL Corruption of X

Well, it wasn't the OpenGL screensaver alone; that's just what seemed to be causing it, and the same thing happened whenever I tried anything with OpenGL.

I did a bunch of experimentation today. I don't see anything showing up in the logs, but I thought I'd try some other drivers. Switched from "ATI" to "Radeon," which worked, but was ugly, slow, and wouldn't let me get my 1600x1200 resolution, but which wasn't corrupted. I tried installing FGLRX, and then switching back to ATI. So far no corruption, but my 3d performance is about half of what it was before.

I had been running fine with whatever installed with Kubuntu originally for months (which I think was just ATI), so I'm still stumped as to what changed, why, and how. I'll keep fiddling to try to get the performance back up.

[SheeEttin]

Re: Sudden OpenGL Corruption of X

Well, it wasn't the OpenGL screensaver alone; that's just what seemed to be causing it, and the same thing happened whenever I tried anything with OpenGL.

I was afraid that was what was really happening...

Anyway, good luck with your fiddling, I guess... You could try reconfiguring your X server ("sudo dpkg-reconfigure xserver-xorg"), but back up your xorg.conf first.