Video "Flashing" With NVidia Card, All Drivers

rgheck · #1 13th February 2010, 03:09 PM

Since upgrading to F12, I have this weird video problem. It looks like some kind of timing issue, with thin lines flashing sort of randomly across the screen, green, red, blue. But the timings as reported by the monitor are correct, or at least well within range, and the same as I get when booting with Knoppix 5.x. I get the flashing in X and also got it in text mode, at least until for some reason it stopped booting into 75 lines and went back to the standard 24 or so. This happens both with the nouveau driver and with the nvidia driver, so I'm guessing it isn't a driver issue but some kind of detection issue. I tried with a different monitor, and that seemed to be fine.

The card is a GeForce 8500 GT, and the monitor is a ViewSonic VP201s. Both worked fine with F11 and every previous version.

I'll post xorg.conf below. Help GREATLY appreciated.

Code:

# nvidia-xconfig: X configuration file generated by nvidia-xconfig
# nvidia-xconfig:  version 1.0  (mockbuild@)  Sun Nov 22 21:05:17 EST 2009

# Xorg configuration created by livna-config-display

Section "ServerLayout"
    Identifier     "single head configuration"
    Screen      0  "Screen0" 0 0
    InputDevice    "Mouse0" "CorePointer"
    InputDevice    "Keyboard0" "CoreKeyboard"
EndSection

Section "Files"
    ModulePath      "/usr/lib/xorg/modules/extensions/nvidia"
    ModulePath      "/usr/lib/xorg/modules"
EndSection

Section "ServerFlags"
    Option         "AIGLX" "on"
EndSection

Section "InputDevice"
    # generated from default
    Identifier     "Mouse0"
    Driver         "mouse"
    Option         "Protocol" "auto"
    Option         "Device" "/dev/input/mice"
    Option         "Emulate3Buttons" "no"
    Option         "ZAxisMapping" "4 5"
EndSection

Section "InputDevice"

# keyboard added by system-config-display
    Identifier     "Keyboard0"
    Driver         "kbd"
    Option         "XkbModel" "pc105+inet"
    Option         "XkbLayout" "us"
EndSection

Section "Monitor"
    Identifier     "Monitor0"
    ModelName      "ViewSonic VP201s"
    HorizSync       30.0 - 92.0
    VertRefresh     50.0 - 85.0
    Option         "dpms"
EndSection

Section "Device"
    Identifier     "Videocard0"
    Driver         "nvidia"
EndSection

Section "Screen"
    Identifier     "Screen0"
    Device         "Videocard0"
    Monitor        "Monitor0"
    DefaultDepth    24
    Option         "AddARGBGLXVisuals" "True"
    SubSection     "Display"
        Viewport    0 0
        Depth       24
    EndSubSection
EndSection

Section "Extensions"
    Option         "Composite" "Enable"
EndSection

ozjd · #2 15th February 2010, 03:12 AM

Try adding nomodeset to the kernel line when booting.

marko · #3 15th February 2010, 05:01 AM

Would nomodeset help with the closed Nvidia driver flashing the entire desktop?
I tried to install the closed driver and I had to get rid of it because after a while on the desktop the whole GUI would start flashing and the machine would be unusable.
I couldn't even SSH into it or get on a text console to kill the X server.

ozjd · #4 15th February 2010, 05:13 AM

It is independent of the driver so if it works it will work for any driver.

rgheck · #5 17th February 2010, 04:20 PM

Unfortunately, nomodeset does nothing to help.

I've now tried two different monitors, and neither of them has this problem. But neither does this one when using Knoppix 5.x, as I think I said before. So the issue has something to do with the F12 kernel, or hal, or something of the sort, since it was also fine in F11.