I seem to have several minor problems that I'm not sure what's causing them. I suspect that they may all be related for the most part. I am running Fedora 11 (uname -r = 2.6.30.9-96.fc11.x86_64) gnome desktop (not sure the version, but most recent for F11) on a Gig-a-Byte MoBo (GA-MA790FX-DS5) with an AMD Athlon 64 x2, 4GB RAM (OCZ 800MHz), 1ea Diamond PCIe x16 HD3650 Video w/1GB VRAM. Now here are the issues:

1. Scroll-Wheel on trackball stops working for Desktop Selection, even though it continues working in other apps.

2. Text on white intermittently flashes from normal to bold continuously for a while. It'll look like the font settings aren't set correctly for LCD, even though they are. I have found that sometimes going into these settings will stop it far a while.

3. When using the desktop calculator in front of an OOo calc spreadsheet with window size at max., when I switch back to the spreadsheet part of the graphics for the calculator remains on top of the spreadsheet. This does not seem to affect the trackball pointer or keyboard, just can't see the cells behind the remaining portion of the calculator. ( version OOo is 3.1.1 the F11 flavour and not generic).

4. I have started using Songbird for my audio player and have noticed somethings there too. (Version: Songbird 1.2.0, Build 1146 (20090623144837). The last played field will sometimes remain blank after playing a track but displays correctly the date/time of previous and the track after the one skipped. It actually played all 3 tracks in order. The Mediaflow plugin displays improperly while editing the metadata for coverart and does not correctly display after saving the changes. However, if I restart Songbird both issues are corrected and everything is displayed properly.

I have noticed that these problem seem to intensify with the more files I have open ie: the other day I had approx. 10 pdf files opened in Adobe Reader and I lost the track wheel function for desktop selection. As mentioned I have 4GB of RAM with 2.0GB swap on my 1st hdd. I have never seen it go above 2.0GB of RAM used, so therefore no swap is used. I normally have FF3.5, Thunderbird 3.0b4, GnuCash 2.2.9, OOo Calc ss, and desktop calculator on desktop 1, Songbird on desktop 2 maximized. All windows on desktop 1 will be minimized unless if I'm working or using that app. The 1st and 3rd problems I remember seeing on older verions apps and Fedora. The 2nd would be since F11 and the 4th since I've started using Songbird about 1 week ago.

Any input would be appreciative. Sorry for being so long winded, but as I've stated before, I strongly feel that there maybe a common cause to all problems although I could be wrong.

Hello hscast,

are you using a self built kernel?

Markus

No stock built Fedora, have not tweaked it under kernel configuration and recompiled. uname -r = 2.6.30.9-96.fc11.x86_64

One other thing that I've noticed. I was editing metadata of my audio files in songbird with 2 Nautilus windows open on Desktop 2 and tvtime playing on desktop 3. The memory usage went 27% used for programs and 72% used as cache using a total of 1.1GiB of 3.8GiB RAM and 36.1MiB (1.8%) of swap. I have seen it use swap it never gets to 2.0GiB of RAM even though 3.8 is avail. Could something be happening with that? I thought that Physical RAM was used before swap, but it seems that it doesn't.

Most probably, unrelated. I am not sure I understand what do you mean on this one, but it's probably related to the desktop itself (and I know nothing about gnome).

2 and 3 could be related, I watch closely the radeon and radeonhd mailing lists and there have been quite a few regressions lately. I am not sure about 4, it could be a bug in the program itself. In any case, I suggest you to set your video driver to "vesa" instead of radeon/radeonhd, and then try again. If the issues go away, then you know it's an issue on the graphics driver and we can continue from there.

I will try that and get back to you. Thanks for the suggestion.

I see. So the mouse problem only happens when the graphic artifacts appear on your screen. There could be some relation then.

Give the vesa driver a try first and see what happens.

Give the vesa driver a try first and see what happens.[/QUOTE]

I have tried the VESA driver but I was unable to get the proper resolution for my monitor, I was trying to get it to 1440x900 and it would set it to something else that was inappropriate for my monitor. I don't want to damage my monitor in the process of troubleshooting this. Is there some way to lock in what I need to use?

For vesa you will probably need a valid xorg.conf, with your resolution and (maybe) your refresh rates (you can see these in your screen manual or the manufacturer's web site.

That's the basic example, you have to tune it up, specially resolutions and the refresh frequencies. You should try googling for "xorg.conf vesa <your monitor model>", maybe someone has already been there.

I think I'm also going to dig up and old eVGA nVIDIA card that I have somewhere and see how that works.

I have successfully changed to VESA generic driver and defined my Viewsonic LCD in xorg.con. After making some adjustments to window sizing and other thinks on the desktop, I got it to an acceptable working environment. Songbird was behaving fine at first but then it started up again with skipping the entry of last played date/time of tracks played. I did notice that it started happening when RAM used approached the 1GiB point. Prior to that it was sitting around 700MiB used. The percentages used for programs vs. caching seems to be staying around 25% by progs. & 52% as cache. I'm still thinking of using my older nVidia based card. Only problem is that it's just PCI and not PCIe. I'm also considering running memtest86+ for a while to see if there are any flaky problems there.

So, songbird is still giving trouble, but what about the other problems? Did they go away?

Note that I only advised the vesa driver as a way to check that. If the problem was in your graphics driver, you should now find a way to fix it. Maybe by tunning your driver, maybe by reporting the bug to the pertinent list, or maybe by changing to another driver. There are 3 drivers for ati right now: radeon, radeonhd and fglrx. So, no matter which one of them you were using, you have still at least other two options to check. All of them should perform better than the vesa drivers (if you can make them work).

For now it seems that the problem with the workspace switcher applet have gone away, as well as what I call buzzing of the text on bright white. However the calculator not going away completely when switching to OOo Calc window is still there. Of course as I mentioned earlier the one of two of the problems with Songbird have returned and seemed to have started right when the about of RAM used approached 1GiB.

Over the years of working with hardware I have seen where marginal intermittent hardware failures can cause various symptoms that make it look like software. It could be just a minor timing glitch at certain addresses of RAM. I may try leaving Memtest86 run overnight tonight to see if that shows anything. Any recommended diags for say the CPU or other logic? It's been a while since I've worked at that level (at least 10 years ago), so I'm not upto date with that.

Memtest86 is a good tool for memory testing, not infallible, but none is.

About the cpu, if the rest of the system works ok it's unlikely it's causing any issue. Just watch out for temperature.

I have another thing for you to check, though: modern video card can perform really weirdly if the power source is not up to the task. So, check that the power source is powerful enough. Maybe vesa works better because it doesn't enable all the special goodies.

I have another thing for you to check, though: modern video card can perform really weirdly if the power source is not up to the task. So, check that the power source is powerful enough. Maybe vesa works better because it doesn't enable all the special goodies.[/QUOTE]

Corsair 620W, I had done the math a while back and figured that I had room to spare. Since then I have switched out 2 of the HDD's that require less power than those that I had when I bought the PSU.