Hi all.

I installed slackware 13. All is well enough, but there is one issue that I would like to tackle and haven't a clue... When ever I got into runlevel 4 (I edited initab to go straight to runlevel 4 to for xdmcp reasons) my slackware splash screen on a 16x9 monitor is essentially 4x3 with the borders on the left and right displaying a garble of the last thing on the screen from the previous x session. The splash screen then goes full screen, then back, then full, then I'm in my kde session.

The weirdest thing (I think) is that the remnants that make up the border collage can even be from an x session from another distro before a reboot. For instance I was at the login screen of mandriva (it's a multiboot machine) I restarted the machine from there, and when my x session starts in slack 13 I can see the user icons from mandriva's log in screen.

I use the latest NVIDIA proprietary drivers on a self compiled 2.6.31.6 kernel, however it did the same thing on the stock 2.6.29.6-smp kernel.

I've googled and haven't found reference of this anywhere, and changing the splash screen hasn't changed anything so far.

Definitely weird, and IMHO points to a hardware problem such as with the video memory or video hardware.

Any chance the machine does this going FROM Slackware and rebooting into Mandriva? Or is it ONLY when going into Slackware from another OS?

By "splash screen" you mean the KDE splash thing, with the bouncy icons or whatever, yes?

Hmm.. I too am using Slack13 (64) and kernel=2.6.31.6, and also nvidia hardware (PCIE cards) and just the other day upgraded to the latest 190.x nvidia driver, from the previous version; but I've never had the effect you describe.

Have you got any other video hardware you could swap in, to at least determine if it's *something* to do with the nvidia-ness (card or driver) ??

One final thought (though it'd have to be a really lucky screwup) -- any chance you might be, for example, booting your Slackware with an initrd, and maybe that initrd is the wrong one, and belongs to Mandriva? Or possibly even the wrong kernel ? This sounds sketchy and rather implausible, but I have read of weird things happening when by a LILO typo, people have thought they booted OS "FOO" with /=partition "1" (for example) but accidentally did so by loading the wrong kernel, say from OS "BAR" with /=partition "1"... Again, this seems farfetched I know; and I feel that a hardware problem is more plausible than this wrong-kernel or wrong-initrd scenario..

Hmmmmmm keep us posted!

Sasha

PS - Does this effect happen if you do a full shutdown and cold reboot too?? Or only with a soft reboot?
PPS - another real stretch (just a thought), but do you have suspend-to-disk configured on Mandriva (or either OS for that matter) and have a suspend partition specified?

How old is your video card?

I have seen this behavior with my older machines with older video cards. Back when I dual booted between Slackware and NT4, whenever I exited NT4 and rebooted into Slackware, momentarily I would see the NT4 splash screen.

My guess is the video RAM is not flushed and X is accessing video RAM locations not really needing to be accessed.

The effect is when initializing, X seems to grab the entire video card memory map.

Perhaps this anamoly happens with newer video chips too, but I don't dual boot or play with distros on my production systems and I can't offer any observations about that. Yet I confirm what you describe --- so keep your tinfoil hat in the closet for now.

It is definitely limited to my slackware installation. I would think that it is unrelated to the kernel since I get the same issue booting with the stock 2.6.29.x kernel and I've never seen the issue with mandriva 2009.1 with which I have installed multiple flavors (one, free 32 and 64) and even 2010 before that partition went to slack. I'm sure that I'm booting the 2.6.31.x kernel from the slack partition because it's the only current kernel on the box. The initrd could be a possibility as I was a little sketchy on what I was doing. Lilo can be ruled out since I never installed it, I edited Grub which was installed with mandriva.

The video card from lspci:

01:00.0 VGA compatible controller: nVidia Corporation G80 [GeForce 8800 GTS] (rev a2)

It is pcie and was bought when vi$ta was released because the machine was built specifically to be compliant with that snafu so it's a few years old, but definitely not obsolete.

PS: I do share a swap partition, but I don't believe I have any suspends setup. I definitely didn't choose to do so. It does seem that maybe it's reaching into RAM or swap. The reason I say that is that when I came home and booted up just now rather than holdovers from the previous x-session I had what could be best described as a checkerboard pattern of static (like an anaolog tv with no reception) on the left and right borders where all the oddities appear. The machine was down for a good 16 hours so RAM should have been clean at that point I would think. However if I logout from this session and log back in as a different user I will see remnants of the previous user's desktop.

Hi

I think that must edit your xorg.conf and apply a valid refresh rate values
The phantom image who you could see is an echoe from back session and vram not clean.

Can '/var/tmp/kdecache-user' be related to this issue?

I edited xorg.conf as suggested above, replacing the values with those found in the xorg.conf file from the mandriva system just to be safe. I thought I might be on to something as the slack xorg.conf was generated by the nvidia driver and mandriva's was done from is configurator (drakx I think it is). The problem persists. As far as ........../ksplash, I'm looking into that now trying to grep -lir the full path (never grepped anything before, is this it's proper use?) to see if maybe I can find it being referenced?

Just to experiment I booted into runlevel 3 and did startx. There is no hint of the same problem as logging in from gui. This would seem to point to the kdm login screen as being the source of the problem and not the kde splash screen (maybe obvious, but since they are supposed to be the same it took me a second). Where is this image at in the filesystem in kde 4.2.4?

Just for the sake of it, I'd like to say I have the same glitch on my Slack64, with the radeon drivers for the Radeon Xpress 200 card on my Dell Vostro 1000 laptop.
It definitely looks like some video memory is not being flushed on reboot, but I never consider it an issue, just a graphics glitch. Now that I see this thread, I am interesting on what can be found. I'm also using the stock Slackware 13 kernel, booting directly into runlevel 4.


Regards.

I'm glad to hear I'm not alone. I have managed to isolate it to booting into runlevel 4 and the login screen. I believe this screen is called "the greeter" from looking through kdmrc. I haven't had a chance to go far with it, but I figured the next step would be to try xdm rather than kdm as the manager. I'm glad to know that it's not specific to the hardware since that means I have a chance of fixing it.

I don't consider it a problem either, it's just that I don't like the first thing that I see to be a "glitch"! (That probably says more about me than the glitch does about any code! LOL)