i have several video problems i’ve been unable to solve. first is when
approaching 30 days of up-time, drop-down boxes become black squares. file,
save-as type operation. you can click somewhere else on the desktop, then file,
and the menu will appear. once you get to about 35 days, forget it. any
dialog box will be black. opening up emails in thunderbird will be black. you have
to restart the system.
the second is video playback. i’ve gone through all the settings, libraries,
etc as posted here. if you playback a video and make the image about as small
as a postage stamp, the video will appear. hit the full screen button and
maybe it will go to full screen video. other times it remains a black box.
video sometimes works better after a restart as well.
when i run xine from the command line, i get the following:
This is xine (X11 gui) - a free video player v0.99.5.
(c) 2000-2007 The xine Team.
X Error of failed request: BadAlloc (insufficient resources for operation)
Major opcode of failed request: 132 (XVideo)
Minor opcode of failed request: 19 ()
Serial number of failed request: 2369
Current serial number in output stream: 2370
does anyone have any ideas on this? are these related to nvidia driver issues or kde4?
I haven’t seen what you describe, but it brings back memories of things I’d seen long ago.
First, I rarely use xine nowadys. It’s not readilly configurable enough to address problems. I highly recommend VLC, and if your screen resolution is high enough (eg approx 1600 pixels) I’d also recommend at least doubling the display buffer size from 300ms to 600ms.
Since you seem to believe your problems only occur after at least a month or so of uptime, I’d recommend you consider looking at memory usage. Personally, after a few posts in these forums which couldn’t recommend good application profiling and troubleshooting tools, I myself have only recently begun acquiring such tools and can recommend installing the following (I’m still learning to use them)…
valgrind standard memory leak analyzer
alleyoop tool to analyze profile data collected by valgrind
memprof Still figuring out, not what I’ve seen described, appears to be a graphical version of valgrind
htop as well as top. Read up on resident and virtual memory reserve to better understand
free displays a snapshot of memory usage
kmtrace KDE memory usage analyzer
xrestop xserver memory usage analyzer
Again, I’m only at the beginning of learning how to use these tools but if you have a specific question I can still try to answer it (or maybe someone else will). I myself have had no problems as yet installing the latest nVidia driver(256.53 for an 8600M) from the nVidia website.
not using it for HD, not a gamer either. the 8g memory is for vmware. it had one of the old ati cards that would not work with the 11.3 live cd (x1300 or something like that.) i had two never installed fx540’s sitting in a box, so i put one of them in this machine. the live cd worked, so off i ran with the 11.3 install. i’ve got several machines running the 540 without problems (suse 11.1 and slackware).
it is kde4. compiz is not installed. i “assumed” the remaining kde4 effects were built-in (i’m thinking that fade-in/out stuff.) must admit that kde4 and i are not the best of friends. are there additional parts of kde4 that can be disabled that might make a difference?
i may be a bit passive with memory monitoring, i rely on plain old vmstat. use it with linux and tru-64 at work. with vmware workstation running, i end up using some swap space after a short time. i look at my si/so values, which are always zero; and my free space which is never depleted. so i’m not memory constrained or paging excessively. only thing i’ve noticed is the black boxes start to appear at near 30 days uptime. that is really weird to me as i don’t reboot often. my sled box at work has over 90 days on it.
Have you check disk space running low on tmp space in root can cause problems. How much space is allocated to root and how full is it when you see the problems.
disabling kde4 effects seems to have made a difference, mpegs/wmv will now play. but they played before and then quit. there may be a problem with this graphics card.