I run RHL9 on an IBM Thinkpad T30 that uses the ATI Radeon Mobility 7500.
Under KDE (not sure whether under Gnome, since I don't use it), I often have situations where an application (say pine) clears the screen of the Konsole window, but leaves behind scattered characters across the terminal window. It then paints the terminal window with new information, with these characters intermingled.
If I now do something to cause the window to be redrawn (by dragging the window offscreen, or changing virtual desktops back and forth), the garbage disappears, leaving behind the legit data in the window.
This seems to be specific to the Radeon, since it doesn't happen on other machines I use (with 845, Matrox G200, etc. displays).
Any clues on how to fix this?
If the terminal gets garbled, you can sometimes reset it by using the tput command. Try these commands in order:
tput init tput reset
While you are typing the commands in, they may appear garbled, that's OK. If these don't fix it, you may have to close konsole and open a new one.
The problem is probably caused because pine may not be UTF-8 compatible, so some of it's screen drawing characters may be seen by console as terminal control codes causing the weird displays. This also happens sometimes if you cat a binary file to the screen.
See the release notes and /etc/sysconfig/i18n for how to change your default from UTF-8.
Best Regards, Keith -- LPIC-2, MCSE, N+ Droplets of yes and no in an ocean of maybe Got spam? Get spastic http://spastic.sourceforge.net
