I have an NVidia Geforce 6150 Go using Nvidia's proprietary drivers, and while it works very well, I get a weird, crosshatched, trippy distortion of blue, gray lines from after gnome closes until the computer shuts off. It moves, morphs, and grows across the screen, and sometimes fades to mostly gray. It also happens when I switch between vt's. I've posted a video on Youtube to better describe it (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vYVWjwDOcwQ). It doesn't bother me, but the only thing is that if it's on the screen for more than a minute or so the screen flickers the next time the computer starts up (in Windows or Linux), and then slowly returns to normal, which makes me think that this might be something funky going on with my hardware. The Nvidia drivers are supposed to support the 6150 go fully, so I don't know what's going on. I'm just wondering if this is a bug in the driver, something wrong with my xserver or what. I'd appreciate anything anyone can tell me.

Cheers,
-Peter

Hey! I recognize that display! I have been seeing it myself in the last few days on a Powerbook G3 with a Radeon Mobility chip!

I see it here when I try to start X with horizontal sync rates specified in xorg.conf that are outside the range of what the display can handle. I think that what happens is that X is trying various modes and things go to hell when it tries a mode that is listed as acceptable but is outside the real horiz rate of the display. I have made a couple of posts about my entertaining experience installing Debian (with Gnome) on this PPC system; you can look them up if you want and see if any of it helps you (it probably won't).

I would think that there is the possibility of hardware damage if this is allowed to go on for too long. Damage to a CRT would be a virtual certainty after some time, but I don't know how these LCD displays handle it.

I suspect that something in your shutdown scripts for Gnome is wiping out the horizontal sync in the NVidia card. You really need to kill X as soon as you shut down Gnome.

That sounds reasonable. How might I kill X after gnome shuts down? (I'm not so good with init.d).

Edit: Actually, wouldn't it be better to just alter the list of accepted modes? How would I do that? Also I edited /etc/rc6.d/K01gdm and added "killall /usr/bin/X" after the line that shuts down gdm, and it did nothing. I probably just did it wrong, but I thought I'd mention that.