LinuxQuestions.org - [SOLVED] Torn down screen output

Hi everyone, Debian (and GNU/Linux) newbie here.

Some months ago I decided to replace Windows with a fresh Wheezy installation in an old computer of mine (~9 years old). Everything had gone well up until a few days ago, when suddenly I got a pretty nasty, torn down screen output. This is a picture of it, taken just 10 minutes ago.

http://i.imgur.com/CFItBOY.jpg

However, I find that, apart from the unreadable screen, the PC remains functional and I can (barely) locate the cursor and click my way into rebooting the system. However, if I fiddle around with the cursor for a while without restarting the PC, the entire system will eventually freeze (I guess at this point the kernel might have gone kaputt) and then I have to do a hard reboot.

There is no obvious trigger for this issue. All the times it's happened so far (3 times) I was just checking Gmail on Chrome with a few more tabs on the background maybe. Essentially nothing else. When I reboot the computer, the problem goes away.

I suspect it might be an issue in the graphics card or its attached drivers. To see if that could solve something, I installed the 'firmware-linux-nonfree' libraries and incidentally obtained a much better desktop rendering, which is alright, but that didn't solve the issue at all.

Here is an overview of my system hardware configuration:

Code:

H/W path              Device      Class          Description

=============================================================

                                  system        Aspire 1650

/0                                bus            Crane II

/0/0                              memory        97KiB BIOS

/0/4                              processor      Intel(R) Pentium(R) M processor 2.00GHz

/0/4/8                            memory        16KiB L1 cache

/0/4/9                            memory        2MiB L2 cache

/0/13                              memory        1017MiB System Memory

/0/13/0                            memory        SODIMM DDR Synchronous [empty]

/0/13/1                            memory        SODIMM DDR Synchronous [empty]

/0/100                            bridge        Mobile 915GM/PM/GMS/910GML Express Processor to DRAM Controller

/0/100/1                          bridge        Mobile 915GM/PM Express PCI Express Root Port

/0/100/1/0                        display        RV370 [Mobility Radeon X300]

/0/100/1c                          bridge        82801FB/FBM/FR/FW/FRW (ICH6 Family) PCI Express Port 1

/0/100/1c.1                        bridge        82801FB/FBM/FR/FW/FRW (ICH6 Family) PCI Express Port 2

/0/100/1c.2                        bridge        82801FB/FBM/FR/FW/FRW (ICH6 Family) PCI Express Port 3

/0/100/1d                          bus            82801FB/FBM/FR/FW/FRW (ICH6 Family) USB UHCI #1

/0/100/1d.1                        bus            82801FB/FBM/FR/FW/FRW (ICH6 Family) USB UHCI #2

/0/100/1d.2                        bus            82801FB/FBM/FR/FW/FRW (ICH6 Family) USB UHCI #3

/0/100/1d.3                        bus            82801FB/FBM/FR/FW/FRW (ICH6 Family) USB UHCI #4

/0/100/1d.7                        bus            82801FB/FBM/FR/FW/FRW (ICH6 Family) USB2 EHCI Controller

/0/100/1e                          bridge        82801 Mobile PCI Bridge

/0/100/1e/1                        bridge        PCIxx21/x515 Cardbus Controller

/0/100/1e/3                        network        PRO/Wireless 2200BG [Calexico2] Network Connection

/0/100/1e/8            eth0        network        BCM4401 100Base-T

/0/100/1e.2                        multimedia    82801FB/FBM/FR/FW/FRW (ICH6 Family) AC'97 Audio Controller

/0/100/1e.3                        communication  82801FB/FBM/FR/FW/FRW (ICH6 Family) AC'97 Modem Controller

/0/100/1f                          bridge        82801FBM (ICH6M) LPC Interface Bridge

/0/100/1f.1            scsi0      storage        82801FB/FBM/FR/FW/FRW (ICH6 Family) IDE Controller

/0/100/1f.1/0.0.0      /dev/sda    disk          120GB WDC WD1200BEVE-0

/0/100/1f.1/0.0.0/1    /dev/sda1  volume        243MiB Linux filesystem partition

/0/100/1f.1/0.0.0/2    /dev/sda2  volume        111GiB Extended partition

/0/100/1f.1/0.0.0/2/5  /dev/sda5  volume        111GiB Linux LVM Physical Volume partition

/0/100/1f.1/0.1.0      /dev/cdrom  disk          DVD+-RW SDVD8441

/0/100/1f.3                        bus            82801FB/FBM/FR/FW/FRW (ICH6 Family) SMBus Controller

/1                                system        

acpitz-virtual-0

Adapter: Virtual device

temp1:        +51.0°C  (crit = +97.0°C)



adm1032-i2c-2-4c

Adapter: Radeon i2c bit bus MONID

temp1:        +0.0°C  (low  =  +0.0°C, high =  +0.0°C)  ALARM (HIGH)

                      (crit =  +0.0°C, hyst =  +0.0°C)

temp2:          FAULT  (low  =  +0.0°C, high =  +0.0°C)  ALARM (LOW)

                      (crit =  +0.0°C, hyst =  +0.0°C)

OS information:

Code:

Linux localhost 3.2.0-4-686-pae #1 SMP Debian 3.2.60-1+deb7u3 i686 GNU/Linux

Here is some graphics-oriented output:

Code:

01:00.0 VGA compatible controller: Advanced Micro Devices [AMD] nee ATI RV370 [Mobility Radeon X300]

drm_kms_helper        22738  1 radeon

drm                  146387  6 drm_kms_helper,ttm,radeon

i2c_core              19116  6 i2c_algo_bit,drm,i2c_i801,drm_kms_helper,radeon,lm90

/dev/fb0

/dev/dri/card0

/dev/dri/controlD64

BOOT_IMAGE=/vmlinuz-3.2.0-4-686-pae root=/dev/mapper/Debian-root ro quiet

/etc/modprobe.d/

/etc/modprobe.d/alsa-base-blacklist.conf

/etc/modprobe.d/radeon-kms.conf

/etc/modprobe.d/fbdev-blacklist.conf

/etc/modprobe.d/alsa-base.conf

options radeon modeset=1



direct rendering: Yes

server glx vendor string: SGI

client glx vendor string: Mesa Project and SGI

OpenGL vendor string: X.Org R300 Project

[    22.145] (II) LoadModule: "extmod"

[    22.226] (II) LoadModule: "dbe"

[    22.235] (II) LoadModule: "glx"

[    22.255] (II) LoadModule: "record"

[    22.257] (II) LoadModule: "dri"

[    22.281] (II) LoadModule: "dri2"

[    22.283] (II) LoadModule: "ati"

[    22.298] (II) LoadModule: "radeon"

[    22.380] (II) LoadModule: "vesa"

[    22.404] (II) LoadModule: "fbdev"

[    22.448] (II) LoadModule: "fbdevhw"

[    22.471] (II) LoadModule: "exa"

[    22.540] (II) LoadModule: "fb"

[    22.572] (II) LoadModule: "ramdac"

[    25.112] (II) LoadModule: "evdev"

[    25.270] (II) LoadModule: "synaptics"

Apparently the graphics controller is Gallium 0.4. I have the open source 'radeon', 'libgl1-mesa-dri', 'xserver-xorg-video-ati' packages installed and updated too. I'm on GNOME.

I performed some more tests and here are the results.

- Ran memtest. Here's the output: http://i.imgur.com/Mmhc4j9.jpg. RAM passed the test so it seems to be fine.

- When the display became scrambled again I tried switching to a virtual console on CTRL+ALT+F1 and even there I could notice some graphic hiccups. Here's a picture of it. In this state, the system becomes usable again. It doesn't crash, but as you can see, it's obvious that going to the terminal doesn't completely solve the issue.

http://i.imgur.com/xTwOg4h.jpg

- I restarted the 'gdm3' (GNOME 3) service.

Code:

sudo /etc/init.d/gdm3 restart

- Switched to Gnome Classic (fallback) mode.

- Reconfigured x11 and xserver packages,

Code:

# dpkg-reconfigure --priority=low x11-common

# dpkg-reconfigure --priority=low xserver-xorg

- Booted from a Ubuntu LiveCD. The graphic display got messed up as soon as I resumed from suspension/hibernation, like in the host OS, Debian.

All the tests and fixes above mentioned failed completely. I also ran gsmartcontrol shallow and deep tests. The HDD passed them both. Here's the output from the deep one if you wish to have a look.

http://pastebin.com/txpDtPyk

One thing I've also noticed is that the error is extremely more prone to show up right after a system boot-up or when the system resumes from hibernation or suspension.

The only two things left for me to try out are reinstalling/reconfiguring the graphics drivers and reinstalling the OS from scratch. If none of that worked either I guess I'm dealing with a hardware issue then but I'd appreciate a second opinion from you guys.

If you need anything else to better understand the issue, just let me know. Again, I think the problem might lie on the graphics department but I might be wrong. Any sort of pointers or advice is very much appreciated. Should I just give up or do you guys have any more ideas?