I had sort of an anomalous occurence involving video on my Debian Sid machine I'd like to ask for some clarification on. This machine has "shared video memory" - meaning the video grabs a slice out of RAM for its needs, as I understand it. In fact, I had to up the amount being alloted to video under BIOS setup, since I was having trouble getting a display at the resolution I needed (up'ed it to 8MB). Anyway, the problem manifested itself as follows: I had several applications and xterms open and running - actually for several days. Then, I needed to open a fairly long text file and delete most of its contents. I did this using Nano (ctrl-k). Part way through that deletion of a few thousand lines, the video began to get really wierd, with alot of streaking across the screen horizontally whenever alot of processor cycles were being consumed. I finished deleting the stuff from the file and started closing applications, thinking this would return the display to normalcy. Well, it didn't: it seemed like whenever the processor would have to make any effort, the horizontal streaking would start. Even moving the mouse around was causing this to happen. If the computer would just sit there with no input, the display looked fairly normal, but as soon as I'd do any input, the screen would start the horizontal streaking I mentioned. I decided to just kill X once I closed all applications, then start it again to see if this would help. I did ctrl-alt-bkspce, then logged in and issued startx. Still the horizontal streaking was going on with mouse movements, oopening of an xterm and so forth. I finally just decided to reboot. That returned the display to normalcy.
So, what happened to my display? I'm thinking the portion of RAM alloted to video must have gotten corrupted or something. Does this sound reasonable? Anyway, suggestions for what may have been causing the problem will be appreciated - I'm hoping to learn something about the way my computer and its operating system works out of this. Thanks, James - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-newbie" in the body of a message to [EMAIL PROTECTED] More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html Please read the FAQ at http://www.linux-learn.org/faqs
