Subtle Probs W/ X Display (Intermittent Waviness)
 

Gurus,

I'm running Mandrake 9.1 with a Hitachi CM715 19" monitor. I'm not 100% sure what my video card is (it's integrated on a Dell OptiPlex GX1), but under Windows it was identified as (or driven as) ATI 3D Rage Pro AGP 2x. Mandrake did a good enough job identifying this hardware, but...

Sometimes text or lines in X get wavy, or staticy, or exhibit vibrations. It's a bit hard to describe, and subtle. Selecting text with the mouse always seems to bring out this behavior. It also seems to happen when the computer/HD is working 'hard,' but this may be my overactive imagination.

Any ideas? I've tried changing the screen dimensions, number of colors, moving the wire, and turning off my stereo, but nothing works. I didn't notice this problem when I used this monitor with a different box.

When installing Mandrake I punched in the recommended sync rates. It never asked about refresh or polarity. I later went through xf86config to punch in the rates manually, but that setup didn't work any better. Again, no tinkering with refresh or polarity.

Any ideas?

During the 1970's, I often had this problem. But now that I'm older...

OK, X-files action here. I thought I was going crazy, until I stopped putting my cell phone near the monitor. Amazing how the wavvyness and 'intermittant' wacko monitor behavior went away.

That's my only clue for ya, or at least, that's all I got from Fox Mulder.

I have an ATI Radeon VE and a Samsung Syncmaster 17GLi running Mandrake 9.2 Xfree 4.3 and I get exactly the same symptoms as you. It sometimes gets really bad.

I am thinking that it might be overworking the graphics card. I have just tried to run Tux Racer to see if the effect happened in that and it ran like a dog (normally it's pretty good), I wonder if there is some way to slow the graphics card down??? It is worst in 1280x1024 as it won't let my card run in 1152x864 for some reason, think the refresh rate is set wrongly, I may have a look and try to fix that.

I will come back with any progress, I am just interested that someone else has it, have you made any progress?

I don't ever get this in Micro$oft windows

I am pretty sure this is all down to refresh rates. I didn't buy my monitor myself so didn't have the manual to hand, couldn't find the manual on the web as the monitor is quite old now, but did find a list of refresh rates that I could use. I found mine at http://www.mail-archive.com/linux-ha.../msg02097.html just to give you an idea of what to look for, go down to the "Monitor section"

1. I put these into my X11 config file /etc/X11/XF86Config-4 file in the monitor section
2. Restarted the X server, Ctrl+Alt+Backspace
3. Went into configure my computer, hardware and change screen resolution and selected a resolution that i wanted. it then required me to logoff and logon.

The screen was a bit better, but i used the key combination CRTL+ALT+Minus or Plus key on keypad to cycle through the refresh rates. I have managed to alleviate what I think is every last bit of wobble.