multiple horizontal lines crossing screen when I startx
 

I just installed Debian (Woody) on an old laptop of mine (Compaq Armada 4160T). It is a 166Mhz, 80MB, 2gig hard drive.

Anyway, the install went fine, though I had to get XFree86 3.3.6 because 4+ does not support my graphics adapter (Cirrus CL-GD7548). Well, X and KDE seem to startup fine except for multiple white horizontal lines running across the screen. They go away when KDE finishes loading, but any new window/application that I open has the same lines running across that window.

I know this must have something to do with XF86Config, but what exactly? If you have any idea what is causing this, please reply. Thanks.

If they go away after the computer's done thinking, it just sounds to me like your processor can't handle painting windows and loading programs at the same time. ;)

Look into your display adapter - perhaps there are optimizations you can set to shift some of the load to the GPU. Although, with a system that old, it probably doesn't HAVE a gpu.

KDE is very hungry. You should probably switch to a much lighter window manager, like IceWM. on a 166Mhz box, every cycle counts. ;)

My $0.02.
--Rounan

yeah, icewm is awesome... blackbox is also good, and if you want something that's not so stripped-down, then you might like xfce...

personally, i'm a blackbox fan!!!

=)


http://blackboxwm.sourceforge.net/

http://www.icewm.org/

http://www.xfce.org/

etch would work fine
 

I had the same problem but i checked out etch. it worked fine for me.

I'm not sure you realized it, but you just replied to a thread that's over 3 years old.

Please do NOT resurrect dead threads.