I seen a problem like this. My computer is an ARM TS3100 with an ATI Rage
Pro 3D LT (8MB/AGP) with a 14" LCD. Here's what I observed:
Before XFree 3.3.5, I used the 3.3.4 hacked to not set video mode and
booted a vesa framebuffer console in 1024x768. X looked beautiful, no
flicker, HOWEVER it had a bizzare problem where after a while rows of
pixels would "jitter"... Basically a lines of pixels would be shifted
over several pixels to the left and flicker, and it was really annoying
(especially since things like switching _virtual_desktops_ changed the
problem - I chalked it up to software problems with the hacked X).
So then XFree 3.3.5 came out and bang, works great. No more jitter like
above. HOWEVER, I notice that when you have a pattern of sharply
contrasting pixels (the netscape 4.0 icon is the best example - the blue
background on the upper-left is actually a dither of blue and green) you
can see flicker fairly clearly. Before, with the hacked 3.3.4 server, I
didn't see this (but it of course had other, much worse problems as
mentioned above). So I have seen a flicker problems with the rage pro in
3.3.5... Not too severe, but certainly a minor irritation.
Oh, one thing to note is that I even when I used 3.3.5 I was still booting
to a vesa graphical console (too lazy to change it :)... Never actually
tried it booting in text mode with 3.3.5...
Then of course the display hardware somehow got physically screwed up and
would roll and flicker everywhere, and so it's on its way back to
california for repairs :( :( :( Only a month and a half old, too...
On Mon, 25 Oct 1999, Adrian D Jensen wrote:
> Update: OK, I went out and did some more searching before firing
> this off. On 9/10 there was some discussion of this same problem in
> comp.os.linux.x. One person gave back a suggestion that works without
> flicker but this is with the FBdev server which is much slower than
> the Mach64 server. The discusion quickly degraded into "I have that
> problem too" and "this really sucks without the fb console" but their
> wasn't any resolution. Kind of the same thing I was thinking.
> Any help would be greatly appreciated, thanks in advance.
Well, if you don't get the flicker booting a textmode console, then you
may have helped me out at least :) I don't mind a dinky textmode console,
I use X all the time anyway. Otherwise... *shrug* Good luck. Vesafb
does some wierd things to the mode registers I imagine. You might want to
try getting into contact with the author of the Mach64 server? Maybe it
makes some sort of assumption that it's starting from textmode and
slightly misprograms something...
------------------ Peter Amstutz --------------------
-------------- [EMAIL PROTECTED] -------------
------- http://www-unix.oit.umass.edu/~tetron -------
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