I have a couple things I think is my video card. One annoying thing it does is to put half inch square boxes in random places and times that might be trying to display what was in that spot before you changed the window. Sometimes it can be important information so I had to find a way to do something about it. I couldn't get rid of them but I could move them out of the way by moving the pointer to a different area and turning the scroll wheel. That would put the square in the new area where the pointer was.
The other thing is very bad scroll control. Sometimes I would have to use the arrows in the corner. Sometimes I had to drag the slider which moved hard , not at all or very delayed.
The squares also make highlighting very difficult. Because an area will not be highlighted you don;t know the results until you paste it. It might be perfect. It's really strange.
I believe the video card is on the motherboard. I do have a spare slot so If needed I could put in a new one.
Oh and where is my title bar at the top of a screen which allows you to move it around or -minimize or maximize or close.

We're going to need some information about what's going on. What window manager are you using?

Regards,

Alunduil

Hi, the box problem sounds to me as a driver issue, find out what card you have and, if the squares appear only at places where the pointer was, then try playing around with the softcursor option in /etc/X11/xorg.conf.

for the rest, going in Alunduil's footsteps : in which application? what window manager? what distribution?

Serafean

OK guys. I forgot to include that stuff. What I am running is windows xp pro with ubuntu 9.10. I got an info overload when I tried the lspci thing. While here I will ask where do you get that vertical bar thing. I think missing that caused it to fail giving me how to use it. I just tried "lspci grep vga and I didn't see anything id the card which Is on the motherboard. I still use the f2 terminal because my terminal won't echo what I type or the results. This terminal won't let me copy paste.

I have been looking for drivers, in particular video, and find I have 4 outdated primary drivers but after I found out there were outdated drivers, I then and only then found out I would have to pay between 30 and 40 dollars to download them. Retail selling is getting to be a very rotten business. You guys were right one of them is in fact the video driver. The others were the sound driver and the mouse driver. I forget the fourth one already.

Whoa! pay to upgrade drivers?!? Don't... Drivers come with the product (or in the case of Linux, the kernel). For the vertical bar : | (called pipe) it depends on your keyboard layout; on US keyboard, its under shift+\, on a french keyboard, its under altgr+6, on a czech keyboard its under altgr+w... sorry, but until I know what graphic card you're using, I can't be of much help (to try the video driver path). Maybe if its a netbook or a preconfigured PC/Notebook, you could post the model id...

Serafean

Or maybe copy and paste this into a terminal:

Press Enter.

Then post the vga.txt file here as an attachment.

I forgot to mention the pay4s were for windows thru software that scans the system to do all the work. I still haven't found a truly free source , but I will. I just read the popups under those links. Neat don't remember that in windows. My son has a canon printer which will install it's driver for the remote, me, from it's memory if it has it. If I can get this post finished I will look into getting the ubuntu drivers.

00:01.0 VGA compatible controller: Intel Corporation 82810E DC-133 (CGC) Chipset Graphics Controller (rev 03)

Thanks for the help.

Wouldn't you know it? Now I can't find the post that had those links and instructions for finding the drivers I need for this video thing.

00:01.0 VGA compatible controller: Intel Corporation 82810E DC-133 (CGC) Chipset Graphics Controller (rev 03)

I hope somebody sees this and is kind enough to send them again. I am getting real frustrated trying to get anything done today.

I wonder what driver you are using?

I would try xf86-video-intel-legacy

Well I just changed the driver in windows, actually to an older one, and at first try it seems faster. I won't say about it's problems right as it is a little soon for an accurate opinion. How could I find out and get an answer similar to your comment. How would I go about trying a different driver.

Sorry I didn't answer this post earlier.
I just now got the information correctly.

xf86-video-intel-legacy
If I did it right above should be my driver. However in terminal I read, amongst other stuff, the following, after coding just lspci which is not what was wanted.
00:01.0 vga compatable controller: intel corporation :8210e dc-133 (CGC) chipset graphics controller (rev03)
Just above that is the graphics controller hub


Attempts to read the vga.txt file in gedit or in open office show it is blank.

I don't understand. lspci has nothing to do with drivers.

Anyway, do you have a file called /etc/X11/xorg.conf? If so, post it here.

Type this in a terminal and press Enter:

and post the output (and the 11 in X11 is the number eleven, not two lowercase Ls).

The cat line found nothing.
I do have a file
xorg.conf.5.gz /usr/share/man/man5 Size=17.5kb type gz archive modified thu. March 04 2010 05:21 am est.
I will guess it has nothing to do with what we are looking for. It contains a bunch of gz files.

The fact that you don't have a xorg.conf is fine, newer versions of X.org try to auto-configure if there isn't one.

How about entering this command: