Display breaks up into horizontal lines
 

I've just installed Ubuntu MATE 15:10 on this computer with this graphics chip:During installation the screen frequently broke up into horizontal lines and it still does it occasionally. The sequence is a slight pause, a blank screen then the lines. Switching sessions by using ctrl-alt-F8 ctrl-alt-F7 usually clears it on the first attempt and always on the second, so it doesn't seem to be a fault in the chip.

Is there an incompatibility between this OS and this chip, and if so what do I need to do to overcome it?

Support for older graphics system seems to be waning. I have found you have to live with the random problems as the focus now days is on modern hardware...

I always use older computers like this one, which has a Pentium 4 2.8GHz x2 and I have found them perfectly adequate. I gave up on Windows years ago when there seemed to be an "arms race" - it was necessary to continually upgrade hardware and software beyond what I needed, or things stopped working. I would be most disappointed if Linux went the same way.

I would say it's waning just because if the developers ever had that hardware, it probably died by now. (I may sound like a hardware elitist, but our house certainly wouldn't show it.) Or, those computers got too slow for the developers to use and they had to upgrade. Not only that, but people already have problems with hardware that's too new, so developers try to focus on those to be competitive.

If you want the best support you must use the hardware that is most popular among developers. Old hardware don't receive new code, It just stays the way it is until it becomes slow and eventually breaks. The only way to fix problems with old hardware is to take a proactive approach. That is to debug the problem yourself and submit bug reports. If you are a coder then maybe you can fix the problem yourself, which is a great way to help everyone.

That sounds like interlacing... I have a hard time believing that it's anything other than the hardware itself going bad. Intel drivers are open source and pretty stable.

What's interlacing Jase?

Here's a nice article that explains interlacing.

Jase I didn't phrase my comment very well - I know what interlacing is, but it's normal isn't it? What I should have said is that I don't understand why interlacing should be a problem.

It sounds like to me that your hardware setup is losing the information about the display and displaying the information as an interlaced picture. I've never heard of that happening spontaneously with an Intel chipset before (a wrong xrandr setting,... yes). That's what is making me think that it's a hardware issue. I could be wrong...

I don't think it is falsely interlacing the picture as the lines are too wide, and they aren't always the complete screen width, both these things can be seen in the attached screenshot (only the bottom of the screen). Sometimes it displays squares (say 3x5) with misaligned lines within. Might have been helpful if I'd mentioned that.

What you say about Intel makes sense as they provided a .deb on their webpage. I installed it and there was no change, then completely by chance I found a new program on a menu which was from them and which I was obviously supposed to run - pity they didn't tell me... It did quite a lot of things so I was initially impressed with their effort to make things work on Linux, but it made no difference.

I usually assume that electronics is extremely reliable, but I think you may be right that the graphics chip is knackered, as I have usually found that Linux deals with hardware without problems, and certainly without the nightmare messing about I used to have when I used the other thing.

I'll have to get a PCI-Express graphics card if that's possible.

Te picture you posted sadly is not enough to definitely tell us if it is a hardware or a software problem. As some other posters already have said, driver developers usually don't really test changes on older hardware and so regressions may sneak in that don't show in many cases. I recommend to file a bugreport and have a developer look into it.

I'm afraid I wasn't able to upload a better sample as I couldn't make it fail to order when there was nothing confidential on my screen :) I reckon the graphics chip just wasn't powerful enough for the OS so I have installed a PCI Express x16 graphics card. I couldn't find a x1 (18 pin) one so I have cut off the end of the socket to make it fit. The idea came from a great YouTube video about sawing off the unusable pins from the card. Clever technology means that it is able to work with however many channels it can see - and I don't need the extra speed given by the other channels.