Hi. Never used open-source driver before, now i am, and here it seems to be even better at some point, pretty fast, no slowdowns and stuff. Although compiz doesn’t get along very well with it, but it’s ok. Anyway… my major problem is that i get some strange flickering from time to time. Which is pretty annoying. I saw there were settings in xorg.conf.d folder, i only specified my monitor’s vertical sync and horizontal refresh to get a proper resolution, cause it has some inconsistency and its EDID is not recognizable, but i have no clue what else do i need. I have onboard Radeon HD 4200. Acer AL1914 monitor.
OpenSUSE 11.4.
This is appears to be a known problem with those using the radeon driver and some ATI/AMD chipsets, and I’m not sure that it has yet been resolved. (It is not clear whether it is a driver bug, or a problem with the X.org server).
Here’s an Ubuntu bug report discussing the problem:
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/xserver-xorg-video-ati/+bug/933289
Post #24 of that thread seems to indicate a newer X-server build may have addressed the issue. You may want to test against recent live distros.
Thanks, i solved it. It has to do with upower daemon (upowerd). Once disabled, renamed, removed, whatever, it stops flickering. The solution is not wide-spread, i found it only on a couple of websites. So for the sake of joy i’m posting it here once again.
Yes, there seems to be a few bug reports concerning this behaviour with upower version 0.9.8
These bug reports suggest that the problem has now been fixed with a later upower version 0.9.9. (For those of us using openSUSE 11.4, we’re still using 0.9.8)
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=668297
The Ubuntu report links to this Debian bug report
#613745 - upower: Screen often blinks - Debian Bug report logs](http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=613745#68)
In 0.9.8 an interface was added to check if your laptop is in a docking station and polls the docking status regularly. This somehow seems to trigger the blinking screen. Richard, it seems “polling” the number of active DRM devices causes the screen to blink. The complete bug report is at [1]. Any ideas how to addess this?
Rather than disabling the daemon (or similar), it is possible to update to 0.9.9 via the software search
software.opensuse.org:
and select ‘Show other versions’, navigate to ‘openSUSE 11.4’, then ‘Show unstable packages’. FWIW, it appears that the Gnome 3.x stable repos have the later version available as does the Base:System repo. For the sake of testing, I chose the latter. The upowerd daemon will need to be restarted before the new version will start. (I simply killed the daemon, and a short time late it was started again automatically).
upower -v
UPower client version 0.9.9
UPower daemon version 0.9.9
Thanks man, it works. No blinking, upower 0.9.9 is ok.
Great. Thanks for the update. 
Good find guys. (I used to see this before when running 12.1, but stopped when I moved up to 12.2 and beyond … currently upower 0.9.16 (factory) and all is well in this regard)