After fighting with SuSE 10 over all manner of problems, I've finally conceded the fight and done a clean install. However, any OpenGL screen saver still crashes the system with some sort of error involving glibc. I currently have an Nvidia GeForce FX5500 card and I'm getting tired of all of the aggro with Nvidia drivers. What video cards are less Linux-hostile and, more specifically, not SuSE Linux hostile but still have decent performance. This isn't a heavy gaming box but I do want to run OpenGL screen savers, which do hammer 3D accelerators, for example.

I use an Nvidia FX5200 video card on two of my SUSE Linux machines here....have used them from SUSE 9.3 through SUSE 10.1 without any problems or issues. Currently, using SUSE 10.1 and the downloaded Nvidia drivers from the Nvidia website, the OpenGL screensavers and 3D acceleration works perfectly.

Cheers,
zenarcher

Interesting. My card worked fine with 9.2 - 10.0, and xscreensaver in particular, literally falls apart after about 30 minutes if not sooner (sometimes while previewing a screen saver). Unfortunately, I can't find any error messages in the logs although I have seen the glibc gripe in a terminal window used to launch xscreensaver.

I'm currently using the nvidia driver on the 10.0 DVD - time to try the stuff at Nvidia's site, I guess.

Sigh... no joy after installing 1.0-8762 (IA32). The failure is, in fact, exactly the same. However, this time I was able to snag some errout stuff to the terminal:
/home/system> xscreensaver
/home/system/.gtk_qt_engine_rc:318: error: unexpected character `{', expected character `}'
*** glibc detected *** double free or corruption (fasttop): 0x0837beb8 ***
xscreensaver: 15:04:45: 0: child pid 6447 (xscreensaver-demo) terminated with SIGABRT.

X error in xmatrix:
X Error of failed request: BadDrawable (invalid Pixmap or Window parameter)
Major opcode of failed request: 62 (X_CopyArea)
Resource id in failed request: 0x3200840
Serial number of failed request: 36084
Current serial number in output stream: 36123
Terminated
/home/system>

Note that the sessions started by showing lavalamp and then switched to xmatrix to try to avoid a total system freeze. The "terminated" occured when I did a killall xscreensaver.

I looked through .gtk_qt_engine_rc and can't find anything obvious somewhere around 300 lines down (e.g., statement fragments, missing }, etc.). I even had the bright idea to pull the card, clean the contacts, and reseat everything (card and LCD display cable). It all remains as broken as ever.

OK, the unmatched braces gripe seems to come from having changed KDE desktop themes. Going back to SuSE-default theme fixed that gripe. Probably it can be ignored.

But the glibc error persists and there's no hint as to where it's coming from, save using GLMatrix or Lavalamp under xscreensaver is when it happens. And once it happens, the system is basically doomed. That is, even with xscreensaver killed off, memory is now sufficiently corrupt that the system starts to hang briefly and then freezes completely. "He's dead, Jim" frozen. Nothing but hitting the big red switch undoes it - nothing from CTL-ALT-BKS or CTL-ALT-DEL.

It turns out that the system isn't quite as dead as I thought, but it's not at the peak of health, either. While the screen freezes up (e.g., the clock stops counting seconds) and mouse and key clicks are ignored, the cursor moves and, as just happened, KsCD is playing a CD, the tunes keep running, and the system responds to pings. So, the system isn't totally dead, just looking pretty sick...

Long story short: it was the video card. A PNY FX6200 card fixed almost all of the problems, at least to the point where, right now, uptime is 2.5 days and climbing (e.g., xscreensaver still acts oddly on occasion but doesn't crash).

I found a link to a thread "screen freezes but mouse still moves" on the Nvidia site's forums and, from there, figured out what was happening on my system (X was basically going into a "fatal embrace" loop althought the OS itself was just fine). I reflashed my FX5500's BIOS (per the thread's contents) but that didn't help; a newer card did.

See my thread "A partial apology to SuSE" for more general comments.