Sorry this is kinda hard to explain, I'll try to be brief.
My motherboard uses an ATI chipset, has a Celeron D 3.33 GHz 64 bit processor and 1G system ram. The onboard chipset provides Radeon Xpress 200 graphics, but I'm not using that for graphics. I was given a Radeon X500XL, a PCIe card and I'm using that instead of the onboard graphics.
I first installed Ubuntu 9.10 32 bit and that seemed fairly solid, so I played gently for a few days. Then I tried my favorite MMO, The Mana World. I had initially configured grub to boot with a nolapic option (because the system would kernel panic if I did not set either nolapic or noapic), and the nolapic option was the ultimate issue I had with the MMO running at about 1/3rd sped. Sound was also stuttering in that configuration, too. Ok, that was corrected by setting grub to use the noapic option instead of the nolapic option, speed came back and sound played normally. a few hours using that and I decided to upgrade the graphics drivers. What a mistake that was. After the update threw some error, I reinstalled the same graphics drivers and got no error on the second installation. I was instructed that I needed to reboot (no, not restart the X server - it said reboot). I rebooted, and that was the last time that install ever ran. X locked up moments before the login screen would have appeared, all I had was a cursor that blinked one time then stayed on. It locked the system so hard that I couldn't use the keyboard to bring up a console to edit the configuration. Power off was all that was left.
I then installed Ubuntu 9.10 64 bit, and this time, I selected to use older ATI drivers. 100% the same exact error, right down to the keyboard not working (I didn't get a cursor this time, so I'm a liar). Reinstall 9.10 64 bit, this time I tried 3rd party drivers. Same error. Reinstall 9.10 64 bit, this time I have left the drivers alone. And I conclude that I can't get different ATI drivers installed right now.
I added KDE 4.3.2, and I set KDE as my default desktop. I reboot, and suddenly, I see I'm using Kubuntu...? Ok, I'll trust that this is the correct place to post this thread.
Here is the problem.
I am having nasty flickering issues during screensaver and when I play that MMO, The Mana World.
The flickering I speak of is not the old screen refresh flickering. I'm using a 75 Hz refresh rate, that isn't what is wrong. I'm seeing segments of other elements breaking through the top window contents. Example, I have the Widget titled "System Monitor - Hard Disk", and the icons from that widget will pop through a Firefox window and through the game window on top of the Firefox window. this is not the only element that pops through. I'm currently using Plasma but this goes further than Plasma. Before I installed KDE, the Gnome whole desktop would flicker in and out of certain situations (yes, the MMO was one such situation) especially the screensaver.
At this point, to me, it seems something is misconfigured in the graphics subsystem - I feel this way because this hardware never had this problem when I used PCLinuxOS 2008 and PCLOS 2009. So, I'd wonder what I can do for this flickering problem. I really think this is not all caused by KDE, but for those who might ask:
System Settings - Desktop
General tab:
desktop effects are enabled,
Compositing is active,
improved window management is active and makes a big difference but is not curing the issue,
shadows are enabled,
All effects tab:
enabled are: Fade, Login, Logout, Shadow, Slide, Taskbar thumbnails, Translucency, Dialog parent, Cover switch, Desktop grid and Present windows.
Advanced tab:
using OpenGL Compositing, Texture from Pixmap mode, Bilinear texture filtering, with Direct rendering and VSynch both enabled.
Otherwise, it looks as if I'd need to give up on the ATI drivers because of the history I've already suffered.
Ideas, suggestions, expert advice appreciated.
My motherboard uses an ATI chipset, has a Celeron D 3.33 GHz 64 bit processor and 1G system ram. The onboard chipset provides Radeon Xpress 200 graphics, but I'm not using that for graphics. I was given a Radeon X500XL, a PCIe card and I'm using that instead of the onboard graphics.
I first installed Ubuntu 9.10 32 bit and that seemed fairly solid, so I played gently for a few days. Then I tried my favorite MMO, The Mana World. I had initially configured grub to boot with a nolapic option (because the system would kernel panic if I did not set either nolapic or noapic), and the nolapic option was the ultimate issue I had with the MMO running at about 1/3rd sped. Sound was also stuttering in that configuration, too. Ok, that was corrected by setting grub to use the noapic option instead of the nolapic option, speed came back and sound played normally. a few hours using that and I decided to upgrade the graphics drivers. What a mistake that was. After the update threw some error, I reinstalled the same graphics drivers and got no error on the second installation. I was instructed that I needed to reboot (no, not restart the X server - it said reboot). I rebooted, and that was the last time that install ever ran. X locked up moments before the login screen would have appeared, all I had was a cursor that blinked one time then stayed on. It locked the system so hard that I couldn't use the keyboard to bring up a console to edit the configuration. Power off was all that was left.
I then installed Ubuntu 9.10 64 bit, and this time, I selected to use older ATI drivers. 100% the same exact error, right down to the keyboard not working (I didn't get a cursor this time, so I'm a liar). Reinstall 9.10 64 bit, this time I tried 3rd party drivers. Same error. Reinstall 9.10 64 bit, this time I have left the drivers alone. And I conclude that I can't get different ATI drivers installed right now.
I added KDE 4.3.2, and I set KDE as my default desktop. I reboot, and suddenly, I see I'm using Kubuntu...? Ok, I'll trust that this is the correct place to post this thread.
Here is the problem.
I am having nasty flickering issues during screensaver and when I play that MMO, The Mana World.
The flickering I speak of is not the old screen refresh flickering. I'm using a 75 Hz refresh rate, that isn't what is wrong. I'm seeing segments of other elements breaking through the top window contents. Example, I have the Widget titled "System Monitor - Hard Disk", and the icons from that widget will pop through a Firefox window and through the game window on top of the Firefox window. this is not the only element that pops through. I'm currently using Plasma but this goes further than Plasma. Before I installed KDE, the Gnome whole desktop would flicker in and out of certain situations (yes, the MMO was one such situation) especially the screensaver.
At this point, to me, it seems something is misconfigured in the graphics subsystem - I feel this way because this hardware never had this problem when I used PCLinuxOS 2008 and PCLOS 2009. So, I'd wonder what I can do for this flickering problem. I really think this is not all caused by KDE, but for those who might ask:
System Settings - Desktop
General tab:
desktop effects are enabled,
Compositing is active,
improved window management is active and makes a big difference but is not curing the issue,
shadows are enabled,
All effects tab:
enabled are: Fade, Login, Logout, Shadow, Slide, Taskbar thumbnails, Translucency, Dialog parent, Cover switch, Desktop grid and Present windows.
Advanced tab:
using OpenGL Compositing, Texture from Pixmap mode, Bilinear texture filtering, with Direct rendering and VSynch both enabled.
Otherwise, it looks as if I'd need to give up on the ATI drivers because of the history I've already suffered.
Ideas, suggestions, expert advice appreciated.
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