Hi Guys, I really need your help with this, I installed mandrake 10 everything works fine I loaded the ati drivers and they are working, ran chromium properly, I have an older pci TV card, its a lifeview flyvideo 98 with fm, it works flawlessly with TVtime but when I start xawtv or zapping it crashes X. When X crashes I can't get anything back on the monitor although I can do a reboot as the system still responds. yesterday I upgraded wine to the latest release and when I tried to install something using wine it crashed X also. I am not sure but I think its a memory problem with the ati drivers, when accessing the graphics in overlay mode. please help.

Regards
Zub

Do a clean reboot.

login to X, dont do anything but start the Application in question.
when X crashes, get to a console somehow ( CTRL-ALT F1)
and use cat /var/log/XFree86.0.log (or where your Xlog file is)
and show us the end of that file, about a good ten lines or so.

This is where your answer lies.

I am not sure what you mean by clean reboot, but I rebooted went into KDE 3.2 and tried to strart zapping, it blanked the screen as if it went into power save mode and nothing I do will bring it back except a reboot, the system still working because I can press ctr alt and f2 and reboot blindly, anyway this is the last few lines from xfree86.log.old which is differnet from xfree86.log the last 4 lines are the only difference.


(**) Mouse1: Core Pointer
(**) Option "Device" "/dev/mouse"
(**) Mouse1: Emulate3Buttons, Emulate3Timeout: 50
(**) Option "ZAxisMapping" "4 5"
(**) Mouse1: ZAxisMapping: buttons 4 and 5
(**) Mouse1: Buttons: 5
(II) Keyboard "Keyboard1" handled by legacy driver
(II) XINPUT: Adding extended input device "Mouse1" (type: MOUSE)
(II) Mouse1: ps2EnableDataReporting: succeeded
Could not init font path element /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/Speedo/, removing from list!
SetClientVersion: 0 7
(WW) Open APM failed (/dev/apm_bios) (No such file or directory)
(II) Mouse1: ps2EnableDataReporting: succeeded
(II) fglrx(0): [drm] removed 1 reserved context for kernel
(II) fglrx(0): [drm] unmapping 8192 bytes of SAREA 0xf9c52000 at 0x4025c000

thanks for your reply, appreciate the help.

regards
zub

ok no, you will need the most recent logfile then, please post it. not the .old

or actually, just post the whole xfree86.log file, catching its contents immediately after starting the faulty application, by switching to a console or VT1 (CTRL-ALT-F1).

and actually sometimes you can kill and restart the Xserver by using CTRL-ALT-BACKSPACE.

using ps ax, while X is blanked out might also show your application running, but attached to the wrong display.
try ps ax from shell, after initting the bad application, and switching to VT1(ctrl-alt-F1)

I have tried the ctr + alt +bksp and I can see the system restart the x server and I know that I can go to a different screen by using ctr + alt +f1 because thats how I reboot after the crash, BUT I can't see anything on the screen untill I reboot even though I do the above. will try what you recommended and post the log file.

thanks
zub

I have the same problem.My card is "Chronos Video Shuttle II" and I use SuSE 10.0.I had the same problem when I used wine in SuSE 9.2 but in SuSE 10.0 wine works perfect.In SuSE 10 I used the ati installer to create the rpm (fglrx_6_8_0_SUSE100-8.18.8-1.i386) but in SuSE 9.2 I used fglrx-8.8.25-0.1.i586.rpm. Maybe this is a different driver version but I don't think that it is related. My /var/log/XFree86.0.log file is to long to include and I don't know if it will make any difference as I can't post its contents immediately after the crash because the only option after the crash is reboot.(No Ctrl + Alt + F... things)