Thanks Nick for a spot-on analysis of the current state of affairs. Yes I could hook up some kit to the signal lines and just measure the frequencies, but the tradeoff between that effort and needing to know that answer currently speaks against it. Besides it doesn't solve the problem for "next time". The approximate vertical refresh rate is obtainable in some places.
As good old CRTs never die, I never saw the need to upgrade to some newer display device which shows me the frequencies at its input on the push of a button or two. (As font rendering now seems to be tuned to LCDs and is becoming increasingly crappy on CRTs, I might have to reconsider.) Someone show me a monitor which does many hours of service per day continually for over 12 years, but that's on the btb. Given that xvidtune did the job well, ok past tense, a question as to whether anyone knows a solution (unlikely, google didn't) or knows of an equivalent piece of software was in order IMHO. Not really my fault if it turns into a long thread ;) As answers are negative, fixing xvidtune is the way to go. Yep it's probably a forgotten app these days. After stracing didn't tell me anything useful initially, a look at the source and a guess on the variable names hints that the error is printed when xvidtune fails to find its X11 application resource file (anyone still remembers what they are?). Good example of a daft error text. Sure enough, strace -f -etrace=file pretty close to the bottom shows a few failed appres attempts. That warrants a look at XFILESEARCHPATH and XUSERFILESEARCHPATH, which I've been setting to the same values for the past >>10 years to include /usr/local/lib/X11/app-defaults/%N and $HOME/lib/X11/app-defaults/%N. They don't include /usr/X11/, but I haven't touched these variable in years and it has always worked fine. Lo and behold, unsetting them makes xvidtune behave as it should. This explains why noone else was seeing the problem, and no, not likely anything to do with SUSE (who haven't set these variables for some time). It seems that previously, /usr/X11/.../ was always searched for X appres files, but not any more. So when you see the error > xvidtune Please install the program before using Exit 3 check your XFILESEARCHPATH and XUSERFILESEARCHPATH variables, their semantics may have changed in xorg 6.9.0. A solution is to leave XFILESEARCHPATH undefined and to add everything to XUSERFILESEARCHPATH. Volker -- Volker Kuhlmann is list0570 with the domain in header http://volker.dnsalias.net/ Please do not CC list postings to me.
