I just installed Suse 11.4 on pretty robust hardware. I was apprehensive about losing Win XP, but everything worked out nicely.
But now that I’m up, I have a serious display problem.
The monitor breaks into many columns of heavy white/color horizontal lines when an app opens
when I hover over an icon in the Desktop folder, into a few horizontal lines of those same lines.
When I open anything, the “clock” cursor leaves a long trail of artifacts that I can drag around the screen.
Here’s a shot of a very mild example of the break up. It gets exponentially worse.
I have a 1388x768 display, and Suse seems to have adapted to that nicely.
The video is an onboard nVidia gForce 6150SE, PCI.
The 2D display driver is nouveau, the 3D is swrast (no 2D acceleration. 7.10.2)
The display’s Refresh rate was 59.8. Setting it to Auto did nothing. The monitor wants 60Hz.
I’ve got 8GB of Ram, 2GB of swap, and an Athlon X3 3100 CPU on a BioStar board.
I’ve done the online updates and rebooted. I don’t know what’s next, except perhaps a dedicated video card, which I’d rather not do. But currently the display is unusable.
I’ve had something like this myself, and sadly, the cause was bad memory on the video card. (In my case, the problem went away when I reset the machine, only to recur either during a game or after a certain portion of the memory was in use.)
While unlikely, the problem might be your monitor, if you have a different one to try, that will help pinpoint the issue.
On Tue, 27 Sep 2011 22:56:02 +0000, paul1149 wrote:
> - The video is an onboard nVidia gForce 6150SE, PCI. - The 2D display
> driver is nouveau, the 3D is swrast (no 2D
> acceleration. 7.10.2)
> - The display’s Refresh rate was 59.8. Setting it to Auto did
> nothing. The monitor wants 60Hz.
> - I’ve got 8GB of Ram, 2GB of swap, and an Athlon X3 3100 CPU on a
> BioStar board.
The times I’ve seen this in the past, it’s ended up being a hardware
issue.
You could try using the proprietary nVidia driver and see if that helps,
just in case. But what you describe sounds to me like a hardware issue.
Thanks for your reply. I’ve been using this machine for Win XP and a few other flavors of linux, and never have I had any problem. So I wonder if something’s just not getting along too well.
Thank you, Jim. I found the driver. It’s NVIDIA-Linux-x86-280.13.run. But I’m lost at this point. It needs to be compiled first, I believe. Maybe tomorrow I can hit it afresh.
On Wed, 28 Sep 2011 00:56:02 +0000, paul1149 wrote:
> Thank you, Jim. I found the driver. It’s NVIDIA-Linux-x86-280.13.run.
> But I’m lost at this point. It needs to be compiled first, I believe.
> Maybe tomorrow I can hit it afresh.
You should be able to just add the nVidia repository and install it from
there.
Awesome. Thank you, Vintage. I had tried the repository addition, but couldn’t seem to make it do anything. This installed, but alas, didn’t fix the problem. I’m wondering if I should reinstall at 64 bits. Oy vey.
On 09/28/2011 04:06 AM, paul1149 wrote:
>
> I’m wondering if I should reinstall at 64 bits.
probably not! reinstalling to 64 bits will STILL require you to install
the nvidia driver…so, you will be at the same position after the
reinstall as you are now.
–
DD Caveat
openSUSE®, the “German Automobiles” of operating systems
Can you confirm the nvidia module is loaded, with ‘lsmod’? look for the module ‘nvidia’ in that output list.
If it’s there, the driver is running and you have a hardware problem. If not, it may not have installed correctly; check ‘rpm -qa | grep nvidia’ to see what packages are installed from nvidia.
I didn’t think to reboot last night after the driver update. I did this morning, and the artifacts were gone, but so were half the display elements, such as desktop wallpaper, desktop folder, application menus and most of the gui. I do get the start button, menus and taskbar.
There’s a warning on the page that Vintage brought up, concerning later nVidia drivers and KDE 4+, but only on OpenSuse x86. So now that my installation is hosed, I’m going to consider stepping up to x64 (I had downloaded 32bit because it was to go on an older machine, but then I realized I had no dvd to get in on there.)
I went ahead and install x64. It was a bit better in some ways. The repository addition went well this time. Ultimately I couldn’t make the install work, however.
I was impressed with openSuse, and definitely will consider it for another install on different hardware. And I appreciate the great input everyone has given me here. For now, however, I’m going to keep looking for a distro that I can make work with what I have.
On 09/28/2011 08:46 PM, paul1149 wrote:
>
> I’m going to keep looking for a distro that I can make work with what I have.
best of luck to you…
i’m pretty sure you will find something that works for you…
but, if not try us again…we have a new version out in November!
oh i forgot to ask, if you just boot from the Live CD, does it run ok?
and, if have an unused blank CD, you might test the next version (12.1)
from here: http://software.opensuse.org/developer/ [but it is known to
still have some bugs, but i think the video is getting solid]
just run from it live, not installed (it will be slower to load
applications but ignore that, just check if video is nice)
–
DD
openSUSE®, the “German Automobiles” of operating systems
I’ve tried several distros today, and have had problems with most of them. They run fine from the optical drive - maybe the live version uses a lesser resolution? But I’ve concluded I have a hardware problem. One possibility is I’m using a 20+4 pin PSU to power a 24+4 pin board. But Biostar told me that would work, except the PCIe buss would not be powered, which was ok with me. I just ordered a 20 to 24 pin adapter, so we shall see. I did get Fedora Lite to work, but it’s too underpowered for what I want to do, so that’s not a solution.
What is likely the case is that the live distros stick with the generic driver and don’t load up as much background stuff either… once you do a full install, everything is running, and once you “reach” the bad spot in video memory, BOOM, you have video issues.
Talk to your video card manufacturer or motherboard maker (if an integrated card). nVidia had some bad chips a while back, and they may well offer you warranty service out of the original warranty for such a manufacturing defect.
That’s a good idea. I just checked through Win XP, and there were newer drivers available there. That doesn’t help me with Linux, though, so I think I need to toss this over to Biostar and see what they say. The MB is only just over a year old, and though it’s not high-end, it still should work.
I can give an update now. That was a good idea to contact BioStar. They were very helpful and stuck with me through many ups and downs trying to flash the bios. Finally it is done, at which point I reinstalled OpenSUSE.
I’m still getting artifacts, it seems a bit less than before. But today the 20 to 24 pin power supply adapter came, so I will be free to place a better graphics card on the machine now.
I’m currently updating packages in Suse, so I can report on the artifact situation. The install went well, and I was impressed with the degree of configuration under the hood regarding partitions and booting, but the one disappointment I had was the failure to pick up two other linux installs - Puppy and Fedora - both of which, I believe, also use Grub. So now I have to repair the Grub menu somehow. But Win XP was picked up.
I’ll post back if there’s something relevant to the video problem, otherwise thanks again to everyone for your help.
Paul
May you prosper and be in good healh, even as your soul prospers - 1Jn 1.2
