Monitor keeps blinking to black
 

I'm using Fedora 10, nvidia legacy drivers, twinview dual monitor setup. My left monitor keeps blinking to black. My right monitor is behaving 100% perfectly. This just started today (or at least today's the first time I ever noticed it. Sometimes it'll go minutes without blinking and something it'll blink three times in 3 seconds. I swapped out the VGA cable and it's still happening. I also dusted out my computer today, so it's not dust on the graphics card.

How can I figure out if it's happening because of the drivers? Or some kernel upgrade or something like that. Of course, I still have to try another monitor in its place to see if it's the monitor.

To be clear, the power isn't going off, the screen just turns black and my right monitor somewhat blinks as if Linux is saying - switch to just using this monitor. Then it goes back to displaying what it should be.

Thanks,

I am now pretty sure it has to do with the nvidia driver and/or xorg.conf. When I switch to a virtual terminal I don't have any problems whatsoever.

I deleted my xorg.conf and rebooted. Fedora 10, like Ubuntu 8.x will automatically generate a new xorg.conf for you. Unfortunately, it only generated a one-monitor xorg. So far it appears to be working sans flickers. So, thankfully (money-wise), it's just a software issue. I will post my old/new xorgs in case someone can offer up a suggestion. Also, I will try nvidia's generate an xorg.conf feature to try and bring back twinview.

old xorg:
new xorg:

interestingly - glxgears runs very, very slowly now - 4 FPS. What does this tell me? I know the nvidia driver is loaded becausae I did an lsmod | grep nvidia.

DJOtaku , how did you install the driver ?
did you use the 173 kmod in the fedora repos or did you install the nvidia.run ?

I used the fedora RPM fusion repos. I have the akmod rpm that's supposed to produce the latest version if it hasn't been released yet.

and it is this rpm
akmod-nvidia-173xx-173.14.16-1.fc10.i686.rpm
and you still get 4 fps using the old xorg.conf or is that with using the new xorg.conf

? that "new " file it was made from running " livna-config-display " ?

I deleted my xorg.conf and that new one was auto-created for me.

the only thing i can think of would be add a few lines to the old xorg.conf
[code]
Section "Files"
ModulePath "/usr/lib/xorg/modules/extensions/nvidia"
ModulePath "/usr/lib/xorg/modules/drivers"
ModulePath "/usr/lib/xorg/modules"
EndSection

# and with two screen sections these go here
Section "Device"
Identifier "Videocard0"
Driver "nvidia"
VendorName "NVIDIA Corporation"
BoardName "GeForce FX 5500"
Option "AddARGBGLXVisuals" "True"
Option "UseEvents" "False"
Option "RenderAccel" "True"
Option "AllowGLXWithComposite" "True"
Option "NVAGP" "3"
EndSection

ok, I'll give that a shot when I get home from work. Did something change in Xorg or Xrandr or something? Those lines weren't in there before and it was working fine.

these are the options i have gotten through the nvidia README for installing the nvidia driver
in the set up and configure section

http://www.nvidia.com/object/linux_d...173.14.18.html
the nvidia README
http://us.download.nvidia.com/XFree8...DME/index.html

OK, before switching to your options I tried glxgears again; mysteriously, glxgears is now reporting in the 1400 fps range.

However, with your options, my situation isn't any better.

I did notice something I forgot to mention. Previously, both my monitors would be at the same resolution. Right now my right-most monitor (the one that doesn't flicker) is at 800x640 or something huge like that. They don't match up anymore. I wonder if that's a clue as to what's going wrong?

Also, if I leave it flickering for too long, it dumps me back to GDM - I guess basically the graphics driver is crashing.

sometimes, however, running glxgears freezes the screen and i have to control-alt-backspace

Tried running a liveCD of Mandriva. They loaded the nvidia 173 drivers and it crashed when running glxgears.

Sometimes (back on my Fedora box) X.org has been taking up like 90% of the CPU.

Does it sound like perhaps my graphics card or some other bit of hardware is failing? What could I check to confirm this?

Thanks!

Hmm....on the nv and nouveau drivers - slightly better performance... I wonder if something's just borked with my 173 drivers? Although, I wonder why it didn't work with the mandriva liveCD. I'll continue to report on any progress. Right now I'm considering removing nvidia and reinstalling - just in case.

Uninstalled and reinstalled. Didn't help me out. I'm going to wait until the next set of patches/updates get pulled through Fedora and see if that fixes things. In the meanwhile, I think I'm going to try and find out how to have dual monitors with nv or nouveau.

as far as i know the 5 series cards have been a problem from day one .
Have you seen any errors in the log file
/var/log/Xorg.0.log
search for (EE)

Now, here's something interesting....the end of my Xorg.0.log files is:

should it be initializing that over and over?

another thing that may help - programs like Blender are running a lot slower than they used to.

Also, decided to check my yum.log. I recently updated:

and before that:
Since I posted the first post in this thread on 14 March, those updates on 14 March are suspect. But are those specific packages likely to be culprits? How could I roll them back to test?