compositing crashing laptop after xorg upgrade

LauMars · 12-17-2008, 06:00 AM

I've asked this on my distro-specific forum, but i'm going to raise it here as well (in case it's a problem others have ran into since the xorg update)

i'm pulling my hair out with this one:

each time i turn on compositing (be it compiz-fusion or KDE4.1's effects) the system runs for about a 2 minutes then just hangs. The mouse cursor still moves but everything else hangs.

I've tried autodetect in serverflags (xorg.conf) both "true" and "false".
I've tried both the open source ATI drivers and the catalyst ones.
I've tired 3 differenent xorg.conf files (by completely clearing down the old one and starting afresh).
I've even (reluctantly) tired formatting the laptop and starting again with a clean build and still the same problem happens.

This is driving me nuts now as even the console switcher and XWindow kill short cuts fail - so despite the trackpad still moving the mouse cursor, i'm forsed to hard-reset the device (which mangled up my partition last week - thus the format and reinstall)

Software:
* KDE4.1
* ArchLinux i686
* Catalyst drivers (though i've tried the fx86-video-ati drivers too)

Hardware:
* ASUS X51RL series laptop
* ATI Radeon Xpress 1100

# uname -a

Code:

Linux OldGregg 2.6.27-ARCH #1 SMP PREEMPT Mon Dec 8 22:01:01 UTC 2008 i686 Intel(R) Core(TM)2 Duo CPU T5250 @ 1.50GHz GenuineIntel GNU/Linux

# cat /etc/X11/xorg.conf

Code:

Section "ServerLayout"
        Identifier     "aticonfig Layout"
        Screen      0  "aticonfig-Screen[0]-0" 0 0
EndSection                                        

Section "Files"
EndSection     

Section "Module"
EndSection      

Section "Monitor"
        Identifier   "aticonfig-Monitor[0]-0"
        Option      "VendorName" "ATI Proprietary Driver"
        Option      "ModelName" "Generic Autodetecting Monitor"
        Option      "DPMS" "true"
EndSection

Section "Device"
        Identifier  "aticonfig-Device[0]-0"
        Driver      "fglrx"
        BusID       "PCI:1:5:0"
EndSection

Section "Screen"
        Identifier "aticonfig-Screen[0]-0"
        Device     "aticonfig-Device[0]-0"
        Monitor    "aticonfig-Monitor[0]-0"
        DefaultDepth     24
        SubSection "Display"
                Viewport   0 0
                Depth     24
        EndSubSection
EndSection

( ^ this is my 3rd recreation of the xorg.conf file too )