On Mon, 21 Apr 2003, Atul Chitnis wrote: > 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? I haven't seen this behavior (in GNOME) but it doesn't sound like the UTF-8 issue. If this is a kconsole (or whatever the KDE terminal emulator is), I'd check bugzilla or KDE to see if it's a known bug, then file it. It's as likely to be there as in the XFree86 driver, I would guess, particularly if that's the only app that has the problem. > Also (possibly related) - when I am on battery power, the screen often > blanks out (under APM, I think), and then I can't get the display back > unless I suspend and unsuspend. Dell laptops using the same video have a problem where the screen goes psychadelic when waking up after the backlight goes off. Dell won't fix it if it can't be reproduced in Windows. The XFree86 driver maintainer can't or won't fix it. He says he can't do anything if the BIOS leaves the hardware in an unpredictable state, but if the problem is not reproducible in other APM systems (Dell would support NT4 or Win98SE in APM mode), then I have to wonder what they do to work around it. Anyway, on the Dell, you can get out of the mess without suspending by issuing the following sequence of key presses: (1) <Ctrl-Alt-F1> (switch from X to VC) (2) <Fn-D> (force screen blanking -- maybe the T30 has a similar key) (3) <Alt-F7> (return to X) Alternatively, just go into the BIOS and disable screen blanking. The screensaver blanks the display without turning the backlight off. That prevents the problem from ocurring on the Dells. It's a drain on the battery though. > > Atul > > -- Matthew Saltzman Clemson University Math Sciences mjs@xxxxxxxxxxx http://www.math.clemson.edu/~mjs
