Author: Russell Gadd Date: To: hampshire lug Subject: [Hampshire] Debian video memory corruption
I have acquired an old PC on which I have installed Debian 4.0 in order to
experiment with it.
The installation works fine except when I try to alter the desktop screen
resolution. On any change in the resolution a small square area (2 or 3
inches square) appears at top left which consists of multiple fine
horizontal lines of different colours which change when I do anything. I
expect this is due to an area of memory being used for 2 purposes i.e. video
storage and something else. Could someone please point me to where/how to
investigate this problem - I'm fairly green with Linux but prepared to dive
in given some clues.
The PC is a Compaq Deskpro Pentium III 600Mhz with 768MB memory and 30GB
disc. The graphics card is an ATI 3D Rage Pro (atir3) with 8MB memory.
In the BIOS there are a couple of settings which might be of interest:
"AGP Aperture Size" is set to 16MB - can be increased to 128MB but this
doesn't seem to do anything.
"PCI Bus Mastering" is disabled.
Although the video card is pretty basic these days, Debian does run fine in
1024x768 if I don't mess with altering the resolution. Once I attempt to
change it, this square appears and doesn't go away if I revert to the
existing resolution. Different resolutions give different sizes of the
offending square so it looks like the duplicate process is using a fixed
size area. I have the same problem if I install Ubuntu or Xubuntu.
