good setup, driver issues
 

Moderator, please move this thread to Slackware Installations if you can. Thanks!

I have a good installation of slackware but my window managers still aren't working right. My video driver seems to be the problem. Here are images that show the distortion of xfce & kde (about 5 MB): http://bluegospel.tripod.com/distortion.html

Also all window managers freeze at some point, although fluxbox seems to work fine until I'm browsing the web or using graphics tools or something. Is there a way to fix these issues that someone here is hip to?

My current video card is Intel 8284G, but that's not listed in the manpage for "intel" as being supported hardware. Does that mean I just need another driver? If so how do I know which one to use and how to get it and go about swapping them?

Pictures are far too high res. Are they bmps? I have 10mb connection here and they took ages to load.

You actually have a screen, so forget drivers, and look at configuring the monitor properly

jpg

Oh, would that be through xorg.conf?

No, I was just bellyaching because they took ages to download. Are they on dialup somewhere?

You would configure the monitor properly in Xorg.conf. Vertical jumps? you should have lines saying
HorizSync 31.5 - 55
VertRefresh 50 - 80

or some such numbers Try the two above if you don't have them. If you do have them, try knocking 10 off the VertRefresh (80 in my example)

Thanks BK, I'll try that when I come home from work today.

I took your advice business_kid, and was able to get rid of the distortion but at the cost of overall clarity--icons are too big & text is fuzzy. At this point I've adjusted the the upper-limit value of VertRefresh but no other values. I guess what I need to know is, what do these values represent? If that answer is elusive, what other values should I try adjusting?

I added these lines with your specs, dropping VertRefresh to 70, and when I ran XFCE everything increased in size but no distortion, although text lost definition and became blurred somewhat. What else can I tweek?

HorizSync is the maximum horizontal speed (across the screen). The faster this is, the quicker your and faster your page writes. Your monitor has a limit, and so has the videpo card. It's the monitor we need to worry about. If this is set too high, the picture will turn into lines and lay over diagonally or nearly sideways.

VertRefresh is the up/down limit, in much the same way. If you're running too fast, the screen jumps

Before I can get too brave throwing numbers over the 'net, can you find the figures for your monitor? My next guess without those is

# HorizSync
VertRefresh 50-90

Thanks BK.

My monitor specs are just above half way down this page:
http://support.dell.com/support/edoc...Specifications

HorizSync 30-70
VertRefresh 50-90

drop the VertRefresh by 5 at a time if the picture still jumps.

I tried this BK, and at first, by dropping the vertsync down by 5, it eliminated the streaks at 70, but everything was too small. When I reset these values to your original recommendation and dropped vertsync again by 5 to 70, this time everything was too big, but again the streaks were eliminated. I'm not sure what to do at this point.

What's going on is this: X has all sorts of possible Modes, and it will try to push your monitor to the best it can do (as as much dots as possible and as fast defined by HorizSync & VertRefresh). Your monitor is not syncing well with the video card, so the picture misbehaves above certain speeds.

Near the bottom of xorg.conf there is a section like this
Section "Screen"
Identifier "Screen0"
Device "Videocard0"
Monitor "Monitor0"
DefaultDepth 24
SubSection "Display"
Viewport 0 0
Depth 24
EndSubSection
EndSection

Just before the EndSubsection, put in a line like this with your choice of modes, e.g

Modes "1280x1024" "1024x768"

It will try to start on 1280x1024 and move to 1024x768 when you press Ctrl_ALT_+ OR -

I think you had fixed your monitor's sync rates (Vertical/Horizonal)at this stage but after that you need to change the resolution of the screen. Specifically "increase" the resolution to make everything small.

Add lines in the video section of the xorg.conf (as pointed out by business_kid in the last post)

Modes "1280x1024" "1024x768"

Thanks guys. I can't wait to get home from work to try this out.

Excellent support guys! XFCE is working fine now.

Now I just need to get KDE working. When I try to run KDE it still just gives me either the frozen startup screen with the graphic ornaments in a black box in the middle of the screen, or it runs for a brief while, then freezes.