On Thu, 28 Feb 2013 20:42:37 -0800
John Jason Jordan <[email protected]> wrote:
------------>%====== snip! ======%<------------
> 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.
I must disagree here. Nouveau does not care about the purpose for
the pixels it blasts onto the screen. It just needs to know how
to put them together. So it's not going to affect just a menu
entry. Rather, you'd see blocks of corrupt pixels, without regard
for what those pixels represent, assuming that Nouveau or Mesa
didn't simply crash. On the other hand, the programs that build
the graphical entities that are converted to pixels do care about
them, since they are creating them. So you need to look somewhere
other than your video driver.
> 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?
Given that you were seeing screwy things in a terminal window,
this strongly hints at a keyboard problem. I've seen things like
this before, when I had something sitting on my keyboard and
holding down a key. Given what you saw in the terminal, I'd guess
it's the TAB key.
And now I see I've been ninja'd by Rogan Creswick. Oh well. I
think he's right. Do you, by any chance, have a spare keyboard
you can try?
> I find nothing of interest in /var/log/messages, nor is there anything
> in xorg.0.log.
Another place to look, at least for graphical programs, is
"$HOME/.xsession-errors". Be prepared to find large quantities of
crap in that file. [Rant about vacuum-brained morons who use an
error log file as a cache file deleted.]
Anyway, I hope this helps.
--Dale
--
Delenn: "Why do your people always ask if someone is ready right
before you're going to do something massively unwise?"
Sinclair: "Tradition."
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