[Tfug] x on an imac

[John Gruenenfelder]

On Wed, Jul 21, 2004 at 04:09:40PM -0700, Ammon Lauritzen wrote:
>Ok, I've got a room full of old iMacs that need to repent from OS9. The
>decision has been made to try Linux in stead of OSX for various reasons
>that don't need to be discussed.
>
>After Mandrake's installer failed on me a few times, I switched to Gentoo
>and have a quite stable setup going. There is only one problem, when I go
>into x-windows, there are rendering artifacts on the screen. Xterms won't
>display correctly, etc... but I have a nice looking gdm login screen...
>
>Thoughts on how to correct this? My x config is very no-frills and the
>problem exists in multiple color depths, so I'm out of ideas for the
>moment.

I'm not using a Mac, but I was having some graphical glitches in X on my
laptop that are maybe not unlike your problems (gdm also displayed just
fine).

The fix was to force the backing store ON in my X config file.  Checking
around, I found that, at least for Debian, the default was to turn the backing
store OFF because it was really buggy.  However, the graphics chip in the
laptop is also rather buggy.  In my case, two bugs make a right.  :)

That didn't solve the problem, but it did dramatically reduce the frequency of
drawing artifacts.

Of course, as the name implies, the backing store is usually for stuff stored
underneath other stuff, so this might not effect new xterms, but it's worth a
shot.


-- 
--John Gruenenfelder    Research Assistant, Steward Observatory, U of Arizona
                        johng at as.arizona.edu
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