Not sure what's going on here or how to find an "error" involved.

Symptoms:
Almost all the time, if I open a window (let's say firefox or terminal windows), the window will come up. Often, the window manager portions (top bar, etc) will not show up, or will not /stay/. If I open a second window, both stop refreshing. Both are still active and accepting input, and I can bring up a right-click menu over things to refresh that portion of the screen.

Often, when bringing up firefox or anything else, the last "refresh" occurs when the window isn't even up yet.

I noticed this also happens more when I'm trying to run in 1024x768 instead of 800x600.

Just recently upgraded (complete re-install) to 9.10. Had Jaunty on it working fine before this and even had Puppy on in just recently ... no problems with either of those.

Any ideas where to look to fix this? The laptop in this configuration is unusable.

Things are pointing towards the graphics driver being used, in my opinion.

if the laptop were positively ANCIENT or slow as hell, I'd be looking at that in general, but if it's the 2GHz laptop in your signature, then age/decrepitness is probably not the problem.

It seems, based on just reading stuff around the net, that 9.10 has a lot of problems in a number of different areas.

For the sake of this discussion, let's pretend that 9.10 is actually working fine generally speaking, and go with my original idea: the video driver.

What have you got in the machine, for a video card? And what driver are you using right now, versus which driver you were using in both Puppy and Jaunty?

Sasha

I've got whatever video card comes with the toshiba (and yes, it's the one in my profile that I'm trying to update, so it's not /horribly/ ancient). I'll have to look it up, but not sure it's even a name brand.

As to the drivers, I'll have to check. In both Jaunty and Puppy, whatever default settings were set up with the install worked great. I never had to change them. Guess I'll have to get an old Jaunty disk and to a livecd to see what it was using by default.

It could well be different per Toshiba laptop (surely they have used more than one type of onboard video) but my Toshiba Satellite has a Trident video card (not great!).. Maybe yours does too? Check the output of:

shell# lspci -v

and note the make/model/version of the card, and post that for us next time you post.

For the record, on my Satellite, I used the VESA driver, because it provided comparable graphics to the Trident driver, and realistically, our trident card is really crappy -- shared memory and all. The Trident driver provided no performance boost.

Cheers,
Sasha

Well, sorry it's taken me a while to get back to this, but here's what I've found so far:

First, I can't find xorg.conf. Has this been moved, or is my problem that x hasn't been set up somehow? (I was looking in /etc/X11 and subs, but also did a find on the whole computer). Or is Ubuntu using something different now?

As to the lspci output, I was surprised, at that, too, but here's what I got:

Hmm. Ok, I know virtually *nothing* about that ATI device, so you'll need either to do some research to see what driver works best for it, or wait till someone who knows, comes in to comment.

As for xorg.conf, it does not exist by default on OS's with very new version of Xorg. On a default such installation, without an xorg.conf, the X server figures out for itself what seems best for your hardware, and sets it up by itself. But, you can still USE an xorg.conf if you want, and you (AFAIK) HAVE to use one if you want to change the configuration of the server to something other than what it thinks is best (such as forcing a particular driver to be used).

Your system should have a command to *generate* an xorg.conf file; something like: sudo dpkg reconfigure xorg but DO NOT quote me on this -- I don't use ubuntu/Debian so you will need to find this correct command yourself, or create an xorg.conf from scratch or from a template.

Sasha