Screen of death
f ^ 11 have recently upgraded my graphics card to an ATI Rage Fury Pro. I have a = VIA MVP3 chipset running an AMD K62-400. After installing SuSE 7.2, vvhich I bought vvith a friend, the screen image gradually deteriorates över a couple of minutes and then the Computer completely
locks up X. This is ali vvhen using any graphics acceleration. Red Hat 7.1 locks up almost immediately as does Mandrake 8.0. My confusion is: both my ATI and Banshee vvork flavvlessly vvith Mandrake 7.2 and xFree 4.01, but they both lock up in Mandrake 8.0. The Voodoo vvorks vvith Red Hat 7.T and SuSE 7.2 (both of vvhich are using an up-to-date version of xFree) and the ATI vvorks only briefly in SuSE 7.2. Any ideas vvhy? I vvant to use SuSE as I paid a fair bit for it and l’m not going back to my Banshee after stumping up £100 for my ATI card. At the moment it looks like l’ll have to stick vvith Mandrake 7.2.
Ray Smith, via email
rljj İt’s almost certainly a compatability £ 11 problem vvith the X server you ane using. *** 1 If both cands vvorked fine vvith XFree86
4.0.1, you may vvant to install that distribution of XFree86. Ali of the distributions you mentioned are knovvn to have had a few ‘issues’ vvhen using XFree86 4.1.0 vvhich, vvhile being the latest release, stili had the odd problem here and there.
If you vvant to stick to using SuSE 7.2, check the /etc/X11/XF86Config file and have a look to see vvhich driver it’s using for your card and vvhat exactly it is trying to do. If OpenGL is enabled, vvhich it vvill be if it’s loading the ‘glx’ modüle, you may vvant to disable that, as it can cause the machine to lock up quite quickly if it doesn’t like your handvvare. Assuming that the machine syncs the buffers before locking up, you may be able to check the XFree86.0.log file in /var/log/ to see if it complained about anything specific.
