Hello forum,

I have a recent version of Gentoo and Gnome installed on my laptop and I get an occasional flicker on the display.

I doubt it is a hardware problem because if I boot into a Ubuntu based OS on the same laptop (dual boot), there is no flicker.

All I know to do is keep running updates hoping it will get fixed with an update over time.

Aside from that, does anyone know where I might start diagnosing the problem? If I create a new user, it still flickers occasionally. If I log into the user root, it still flickers but not as much. I have turned things on or off in the graphics section of the genkernel but nothing has helped so far.

The laptop has an Intel GM45 video chipset (X4500HD) and I use X for the display.

I don't have much hope in getting it fixed but I thought I would post here just in case someone can enlighten me.

Thanks in advance,
Roy

Usual cause of screen flicker is slow refresh rate - 60 hz or below.

1st suggestion - hide xorg.conf and see if that sorts it. Second, add or adjust the HorizSync & VertRefresh settings. Vertrefresh might be 50-90, or the like. Set it at 65-90, and that cuts off slow rates.

I could not change my screen refresh rate because it was fixed on 60. And I do not have an xorg.conf file because hal does all of the configuring. But after more serching, I discovered my problem was common with people with the Intel GM45 chipset in Linux. The fix (actually a workaround) was to pass "i915.powersave=0" to the kernel before boot. Or if you have an initial ramdisk, you can creat a file called "modprobe.conf" and put "options i915 powersave=0" in it and place the file in the modprobe.d directory. I am so pleased I finally got the occasional flicker out of my display.

All the best,
Roy