LEAP 42.3 screen refresh problem
 

Hi all, I've upgraded to 42.3.

All but one matters seems very good.

That matter is the failure of screen information to refresh!

At first it was random and I was unable to make it happen but I've since discovered that if I open a subscreen in Firefox or an info box almost anywhere, that new window is illegible until I pass the cursor through it or expand it to full size.

When opened, the new window looks like a character of a tv screen with no signal, just horizontal squiggly random lines. Sometimes coloured.

Pulling the cursor through that window clears that mush where it travels revealing the underlying text or whatever although the remainder of the window remains obscured. Causing the window to expand to full size clears all the rubbish immediately revealing all.

I have raised a bugzilla report No.1051867 and submitted my /var/log/Xorg.0.log.

After some suggestions from the bug team, I changed the screen resolution, the refresh rate, and the three rendering backends available to me without noticeable change.

All has gone quiet from bugzilla since the last communication on the 2nd August.

Has anybody else seen this problem or got any other ideas I might explore to eradicate the annoyance?

Regards

Chris

this is KDE, yes?
have you tried to turn off desktop effects completely? or fine tune them
when changing the rendering backend or effect you might need to restart KDE to see a real change happen

playing with resolutions and refresh rates should not be a solution to this, leaf this to the default

what happens if you use an other window manager?
Just for test, some simple one so that you do not have to install a full gnome
if this problem is only within KDE, this narrows down the problem and helps a lot

did you update your machine? the xorg kernel entry does not show the latest kernel

Hi A4z,
Yes KDE. I haven't tried switching effects off. I'll look into that and try it.

The machine has been rebooted many times since this update, is that enough or is there a need to restart KDE in some other way?

I'll look into trying another manager, have you any suggestions?

I installed LEAP 42.1 on this dedicated machine last year and had upgraded as the iterations became available. I assumed kernel upgrades would have been included!

Neither 42.1 or 42.2 showed any signs of this behaviour.

Regards

Chris

I have turned off every thing I can find in KDE that I can, and the situation is much worse.

I have been cleaning a printer head by repeatedly printing a coloured page, now, when I attempt to print it the system crashes! Well freezes anyway. It no longer responds to any input.

Ctrl/Alt F2 does not go where it is supposed to go so I can only switch the machine off by holding the power button.

I tried this two or three times and the second time I left it alone for well over an hour to see if it would recover.

I've had enough. I am now actively seeking the techniques to go back to LEAP 42.2 which was fine.

I shall be starting that process soon so if there are any logs anyone would like to see, shout soon.

Regards and thanks for your inputs

Chris

still do not know if this is a KDE problem or not,
if you haven't re installed already, give some other djustesktop a try and report the result to the bug report you have written, this will help

installing xfce for example is super simple via yast, just one click

Here is the problem A4z, Yast lists perhaps 30 files containing xfce and not one of them says 'Drink me!'

This is the difference between somebody that knows what they are doing and bumblers!

You know which group I'm in!

yast - software managment, left upper drop down select patterns

there you have the one click drink me
this is from a very olde suse,
https://www.suse.com/documentation/s...stall_wbem.png

but today it does not look that much different, and it might give you an idea

install via zypper should be
but use yast

Hi A4z, All,

Another small step for mankind! Xfce installed and run. Interesting. Without the ability to google most of these things and how to go about them, it would be very difficult and even more time consuming than it is. I simply couldn't find a way to start xfce! Eventually got it. Reboot!

I haven't been seeing much of the original problem in KDE since I altered just about everything in the windows management, defaulting to 'doing little or nothing'.

But still it happens, now and then. The 100% reliability of it appearing in side windows of Firefox has disappeared as well, however, xfce!

Chugged my way through dozens of configuration windows in the xfce 'settings' and all seem to be ok and then bam!

Just the top half of a window was covered in coloured wavy lines. I tried the 'draw the cursor though it' technique but it had no effect. When I moved the window it cleared and displayed properly. A few dozen other openings did not reproduce the error however, once is enough methinks!

I didn't go on.

well, it this problem occurs also with XFCE, than you know that this is not a KDE problem,
that is good, because now one reason can be eliminated
you might want to add this info to your bug report, what you did, and describe your hardware setup a little bit more, like which hardware, which monitor,
it seems you have a VGA cable to a older 1280x1024@60.0 monitor, is this relay what you use, is this CRT or TFT?
such info makes it more easy for the people at Suse to search for the problem,

Hi A4z,
Dell OptiPlex 780 X86-64
Intel Graphics Media Accelerator 950
Intel 4 Series Chipset Integrated Graphics Controller
Intel Gigabit Ethernet Controller
Intel(R) Core(TM)2 Quad CPU Q8400 @ 2.66GHz
8Gb RAM
Intel SATA Controller [RAID mode] 2 x 1Gb HD (Mirrored)
PIONEER DVD-RW DVR-219L
WLAN network interface
DELL 1907FP LCD monitor

I'm currently running at 1152 x 864 having changed from 1280 x 960 to stir things up a little.

Here is where being ignorant really makes life difficult. My Bugzilla report cannot be found. I've had a few emails from an engineer asking for further information but the return address is 'bugzilla_noreply@novell.com'

I cant find my original submission and logging 1n to bugzilla mozilla isnt it!

it seems you found your bug report shortly your post
I hope it will help that you get support
if not, have your tried the opensuse forums?
since you have now an account, you can also login there
https://forums.opensuse.org/forum.php

you should not change the resolution of your monitor to make things bigger, use DPI settings and font sizes.
let everything per default, your system will autodetect everything for you and make the optimal settings. 'Your system is new and standard enough.
try to reset everything to default, and than, leaf it as it is.

you use a VGA cable, do you also have a DVI cable and tried this?

Hi A4z, no DVI but I have some good news.

Bugzilla advised me to remove drm-kmp

I did and Voila! No more problems.

I have subsequently updated the kernel to 4.13.

I will now try to reset KDE to how I want it rather than the bare minimum, hopefully that will be fine too but listen, I deleted drm-kmp, but what was it? do I need it? Should I find something better?

It was over 400Mb so it must have been doing something!

Thanks again. I will close this thread once I have done a few more things to KDE.

interesting!
does this mean it is recommended on older intel graphics to remove drm-kmp ?
and what would be old, 2011. 2010, the mentione cpu is from 2009
need to research this

glad you machine works again as you want

Much better now thanks, but...
 

I had been seeing problems with flickering when I tried upgrading from Suse 13 to Leap 42.2. When I upgraded to Leap 42.3 the screen flickering went away, but the garbling of menu graphics became regular; a; the menus became unusable at times. After uninstalling drm-kmp-default the menu issue appears to be mostly solved; only a brief moment of messy graphics when a menu was first used. There is still an intermittent problem with the rendering of the text boxes when hovering over items which makes them unintelligible. In some cases when the problem occurs it clears after a short time, sometimes it remains until the cursor is moved away. Usable but not working correctly
Hardware:
Gigabyte Technology Co., Ltd - GA-MA78GM-S2H
AMD Athlon(tm) 64 X2 Dual Core Processor 5000+
ATI 780G with Radeon HD 3200 integrated graphics.

The menu problem is still there!
 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=isu75gQec_s
The issues had not gone away - they were just not active at the time. This video shows the problem. I noticed that on occasion the Dolphin File menu displayed bits of the Brave browser menu! The programmes I was running at the time behaved differently; Brave was pretty good, Firefox a bit iffy; Kmail and Dolphin were pretty bad.
This is definitely a problem with the KDM display manager; I installed Gnome GDM and have not seen any menu problems running Dolphin, Firefox or Kmail from the Gnome desktop. GDM appears to be faster than KDM, though ther is a very slight flicker on my system when a new window or menu opens.
The drm_kmp_default removal actually made no difference at all - the symptoms are just intermittent and unpredictable.