This morning I noticed that the ASUS (model # buried someplace) 22" LCD monitor that my desktop computer uses was flickering. It was not the entire monitor, just menu items in programs. If I selected a menu item in the program the flickering would cease while the menu dropdown was displayed. It was really difficult to click on things because I had to click precisely when the flicker was at the top.
At first I thought it was Banshee, because that is what was on the screen at the time. I could not easily terminate Banshee because of the difficulty in clicking on things, so I opened a GUI terminal. When the terminal opened it immediately displayed "do you want to list all 2253 items? Y/N," as though I had already given it a command. It accepted "N" from the keyboard without problem, and I was able to terminate Banshee, but the "do you want to list all 2253 items?" message kept re-displaying. Finally I tried other programs and discovered that the flickering was happening with all of them. I rebooted the computer and the flickering started as soon as the GUI came up. I was in a hurry and only wanted to get Banshee running so I could listen to an internet radio station while I finished getting ready to go to PSU. Although it was flickering, Banshee operated normally as soon as it took my click on the start button for the station I wanted. Half an hour later I was ready to leave the house. As I sat down to do a last minute e-mail check on my laptop (different computer) I glanced at the screen for the desktop and noted that the flickering had stopped. Not having time to deal with it further, or any idea what to do next, I left the house with Banshee running, streaming the radio station. When I came home about 7:15 I looked at the screen and Banshee was back to flickering, although otherwise operating normally with the same station still streaming. An hour later it stopped flickering. The computer is a 3 year old desktop that I built myself with an ASUS M2NPV-VM motherboard. It is running a recently installed Xubuntu 12.04, using the GeForce 6150 on the motherboard with the open source nouveau drivers. Software Update reports that it is up to date. Conclusions: It seems to me that the most likely source of the problem is the nouveau driver. I say this because it is only menu items and lists that are flickering, not the entire screen. However, there has not been any flickering until this morning, and no software changes (i.e., updates) have been made for at least three weeks. That makes it sound like a hardware problem. However, why would a hardware problem affect only menus and lists in program windows? I find nothing of interest in /var/log/messages, nor is there anything in xorg.0.log. I could use some suggestions and ideas for further troubleshooting. _______________________________________________ PLUG mailing list [email protected] http://lists.pdxlinux.org/mailman/listinfo/plug
