Something weird just happened to my fluxbox display. Any explanations?

I've used fluxbox for years and this is the first time I've seen anything like this. It started with a blocky distortion in the digital clock which I have on the right side of my panel.Then the captions on the taskbar became distorted. Each time I changed them by switching windows it got worse. So I exited fluxbox. By this time the fluxbox menu was affected too but I didn't see anything odd inside any of the windows. When I typed startx again, everything came up normal.

Hopefully it won't happen again but I'd be interested to know the mechanism. If it's an X thing, why did it only affect the window manager and not any of the other programs?

PS: now that I come to think about it, I once saw something rather similar after an AntiX dist-upgrade. I had Conky on my desktop and it started blocking out like that. Anticapitalista provided something that fixed it but I've forgotton what it was.

Yeah. I kinda remember the 2 conky instance on startup thread.

Just wondering myself if antique video chip is getting long in tooth.

  inxi -G

what are you running? Company driver? Vesa ?
Dist-upgrade done recently? Maybe causing this with a different upgraded Xorg?

This is Slackware, remember! Rock solid, not many upgrades. I don't have inxi installed but the graphics are intel, cpu with built-in video.

Originally Posted by hazel I don't have inxi installed

Is lspci installed?

lspci -k

could shed some light.

00:00.0 Host bridge: Intel Corporation Atom Processor Z36xxx/Z37xxx Series SoC Transaction Register (rev 0e)
        Subsystem: Lenovo Atom Processor Z36xxx/Z37xxx Series SoC Transaction Register
        Kernel driver in use: iosf_mbi_pci
00:02.0 VGA compatible controller: Intel Corporation Atom Processor Z36xxx/Z37xxx Series Graphics & Display (rev 0e)
        Subsystem: Lenovo Atom Processor Z36xxx/Z37xxx Series Graphics & Display
        Kernel driver in use: i915
        Kernel modules: i915
00:1c.0 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation Atom Processor E3800 Series PCI Express Root Port 1 (rev 0e)
        Kernel driver in use: pcieport00:1f.0 ISA bridge: Intel Corporation Atom Processor Z36xxx/Z37xxx Series Power Control Unit (rev 0e)
        Subsystem: Lenovo Atom Processor Z36xxx/Z37xxx Series Power Control Unit
        Kernel driver in use: lpc_ich
        Kernel modules: lpc_ich
00:1f.3 SMBus: Intel Corporation Atom Processor E3800 Series SMBus Controller (rev 0e)
        Subsystem: Lenovo Atom Processor E3800 Series SMBus Controller
        Kernel driver in use: i801_smbus
        Kernel modules: i2c_i801

I've edited that a bit so it's graphics and buses only. I assume the disk and network controllers aren't relevant here.

Have you looked in the log files? I'd start with the Xorg logs.

Frankly, I wouldn't be optimistic, but it's worth a shot.

Originally Posted by frankbell Have you looked in the log files? I'd start with the Xorg logs.

Now that would have been a thought! But it's much too late now because the Xorg log isn't cumulative and I've had more than two boots since then.

It hasn't happened again but if it ever does, I'll remember to check the Xorg log.

Video failing is my guess but could be almost anything.

Video memory is a region in main memory in case of Intel integrated video, can be replaced if needed.