fglrx and gnome shell...

[bigj6360]

Hi all,

I am new to sabayon and am having an annoyance with the ati drivers it uses. I have played with the various drivers (proprietary, radeon, and radeonhd) on other linux distributions (opensuse and linuxmint) and have the same issue. I'm stuck on how to get it fixed and any help would be appreciated.

Here's my issue:
I receive periodic flashes when using Gnome shell (no issues in kde, or lxde). It isn't timed(ie. like every 30 sec), but varies (can be as low as 10 sec, but as high a 45-50 sec). This flash causes whatever I am typing to quit accepting input requring me to click in the text box and continue. In opensuse It would do the same, but every 5 minutes or so it would log me completely out of gnome.

The Xorg, dmesg, and messages logs show nothing new after the flash (maybe flicker is a better description?). This issue does not exist when in fallback mode (in both opensuse and linuxmint... not tested in sabayon). I guess I should say it doesn't happen under windows either.

System info:
MB: ASUS ncch-dl dual 3.2ghz xeons
ATI hd4600 512MB (AGP)

If you need more info, please let me know

thanks,
-Me

[Fitzcarraldo]

Seems like you're suffering from the infamous FGLRX Bug 99 - Graphical corruption with gnome-shell. Perhaps if you try the export command in Comment #173 in that bug report, it might help.

From the Gentoo GNOME 3.2 Upgrade Guide:

GNOME Shell shows graphical corruption under some versions of x11-drivers/ati-drivers (i.e. FGLRX binary drivers); many of the 11.x versions are known to be affected. As a workaround, you can force GNOME to start in fallback mode (see Troubleshooting section below), or alternatively, switch to open-source drivers.

[bigj6360]

Thanks for the reply.

It seems like it is a little worse (about a corruption every 5-10 seconds).

I'll try the opensource drivers, but in opensuse and linuxmint the opensource drivers had another issue for me (periodic X server freezing).

THanks again,
-Me