Losing text in editors/terminals

[dutchy69]

Hello,

I've recently installed OpenSuse 12.1 (new installation). It's working mostly ok, except for the following: when using text editors or typing commands in a terminal, I am regularly losing text. With that I mean that output from the commands that I type on the command line is often only partly shown or not at all. Pressing enter again often reveals the hidden text. In editors similar things happen: text sometimes disappears/reappears when scrolling through the text or when adding new lines of text. I guess there most be something wrong in the communication with my graphics card, but I don't know how to trace+solve the problem. Anyone with some suggestion?
Before I was running OpenSuse 11.4 and had no such problems.
Thanks in advance.

System:
Dell Precision 370
Intel(R) Pentium(R) 4 CPU 3.00GHz
1 GB RAM
Running KDE

Graphics (according to System Information)
Graphics Card ATI FireGL V3600
2D driver: Radeon
3D driver: Unknown Gallium (7.11)

[DenverD]

On 01/09/2012 12:36 PM, dutchy69 wrote:
>
> I guess there most be something wrong in the
> communication with my graphics card,

sure sounds like a graphics/video problem to me, and i guess you are not
running the best drivers for your hardware...suggest you begin here:
http://tinyurl.com/37v9y7m

--
DD http://tinyurl.com/DD-Caveat
openSUSE®, the "German Engineered Automobiles" of operating systems!

[dutchy69]

Thank you, DenverD. I will have a look.

[dutchy69]

Well, 1 step forward. System info told me that the radeon driver was loaded. Comparing "man radeon" and "man radeonhd" teached me that my FireGL V3600 card is supported by the radeonhd driver. So I added Driver "radeonhd" to /etc/X11/xorg.conf.d/50-device.conf.
Only this does not seem to work with kernel moduling enabled, so I had to restart the computer and enter "nomodeset" at the boot menu prompt.

Text in editors/terminal seems to behave normally now. Only thing is that everything is rather slow now: switching between desktops, activating windows, etc. has slowed down.
But hey, at least I can work now, so this performance issue is for later.

Sytem info now says:
Graphics Card ATI FireGL V3600
2D driver: radeonhd
3D driver: swrast (No 3D Acceleration) (7.11)

Not sure if the slower behaviour is due to nomodeset or to missing 3D acceleration.

[DenverD]

On 01/10/2012 10:46 AM, dutchy69 wrote:
> so I had
> to restart the computer and enter "nomodeset" at the boot menu prompt.
>
> Not sure if the slower behaviour is due to nomodeset or to missing 3D
> acceleration.

i hope you can catch oldcpu's interest because he knows more about this
than me..

--
DD http://tinyurl.com/DD-Caveat
openSUSE®, the "German Engineered Automobiles" of operating systems!

[oldcpu]

Well, 1 step forward. System info told me that the radeon driver was loaded. Comparing "man radeon" and "man radeonhd" teached me that my FireGL V3600 card is supported by the radeonhd driver. So I added Driver "radeonhd" to /etc/X11/xorg.conf.d/50-device.conf.
Only this does not seem to work with kernel moduling enabled, so I had to restart the computer and enter "nomodeset" at the boot menu prompt.

Text in editors/terminal seems to behave normally now. Only thing is that everything is rather slow now: switching between desktops, activating windows, etc. has slowed down.
But hey, at least I can work now, so this performance issue is for later.

Sytem info now says:
Graphics Card ATI FireGL V3600
2D driver: radeonhd
3D driver: swrast (No 3D Acceleration) (7.11)

Not sure if the slower behaviour is due to nomodeset or to missing 3D acceleration.

As you discovered the radeonhd driver does not go along with kernel modeset setting (KMS) so it needs to be disabled with something like 'nomodeset' in order to load when using the radeonhd driver.

For those who have not looked at 'man radeon' and 'man radeonhd' one gets with 'man radeon:

       RV610/RV630 Radeon HD 2400/2600

and with 'man radeonhd' :

       RV630   Radeon HD 2600 LE/Pro/XT, HD 2600 Pro/XT AGP; Gemini RV630; FireGL V3600/V5600

As to why the performance is worse in radeonhd, well that driver is mostly no longer supported and all the development effort is going into the 'radeon' driver. So you could try to improve 'radeonhd' performance but IMHO you may not succeed. Or you could try to improve 'radeon' driver behaviour (to get rid of the effects you saw) by possibly identifying what is causing the error, and see if there is any fix that can be applied to a configuration file to remove the error.

Have you compared the /var/log/Xorg.0.log files that you get when booting with the 'radeon' driver, to the /var/log/Xorg.0.log file you get when booting with the 'radeonhd' driver and 'nomodeset' boot code ? Please do not post those log files here as they will clutter the thread making it unreadable. If you wish to show something big in them, then post it to SUSE Paste, press create and post here just the webite(s) URL where the log files are located.

I'm no expert in this (despite DenverD's kind words) but others may see something.