[lug] Laptop screen gets out of sync

[D. Stimits]

Ed Hill wrote:
> On Thu, 2002-08-22 at 15:30, J. Wayde Allen wrote:
> 
>>One interesting thing I've discovered on my new laptop is that after the
>>screen saver runs the screen ends shifted half way.  The bottom of th
>>screen ends up accross the middle of the display with the top part
>>beginning underneath that and running off the bottom of the screen.  
>>(Think of wrapping the display around a cylinder and rolling this up half
>>way.)  Seems like a synchronization problem, but I haven't determined how
>>to fix it.  Thought I'd see if there are any ready made fixes out there?
> 
> 
> 
> Hi Wade,
> 
> Uh, don't run the screen saver?  ;-)
> 
> Seriously, a number of the Xscreensaver modules will try to use OpenGL
> calls and, on many graphics chipsets, the XFree86 3D implementations
> (whether part of XFree or closed-source from, eg., nVidia) are buggy
> and/or unstable.  In fact, I've had Xscreensaver crash so many systems
> (we have a lot of old and odd hardware in our labs) that I now typically
> turn it off or set it to something mostly harmless like the "Matrix"
> screensaver.

I don't know about the mobile chips, but the nv drivers on typical 
GeForce hardware are very stable, at least for me. Of the reports I've 
seen, almost all of the instabilities were related to AGP modules or AGP 
settings, often in combination with motherboard chipsets. And anyone 
that mixes hardware accel and software Mesa versions of OpenGL is asking 
for trouble...but it is hard to know at times when you have the right 
versions and no mix.

I wonder if perhaps xvidtune would do the trick? Maybe some custom 
tuning parameters would put it back.

D. Stimits, stimits AT attbi.com