Occasional Display Corruption With Fedora 17

[ghborrmann]

Running Gnome3 under F17 on an AMD Athlon 64 processor, using the nouveau driver, the display occasionally changes so as to be unusable. It is always when I have multiple workspaces, and usually have multiple terminals open. When it occurs, blank portions of the desktop suddenly contain garbage - sometimes merely stripes but often looking like a portion of a different workspace. Inactive terminals look unchanged, but when I click on one of them to activate it, I can't see the typing. Apparently the terminal is now set to show white letters on a white background. I can execute commands in the terminal, but can't see the output. All of the workspaces are affected this way; the only thing I know to do at this point is to reboot.

At the very least, I would like to be able to reverse the changes when they occur so that I could continue the session without a reboot. I would appreciate any suggestions towards identifying the cause or finding a work-around.

[Dies]

You should be able to restart just the shell by hitting Alt + F2 then typing r and enter.

You can also switch over to a console by hitting Ctrl+Alt+F2, for example, then log in and restart the shell from there.

DISPLAY=:0 gnome-shell --replace

Have you looked at any logs yet?

[ghborrmann]

Thanks for the reply. Something happened again, but somewhat different from the previous occasions. This time my open terminals and other open apps were not affected; only the desktop background was affected. The desktop was cluttered with remnants that I remember having seen earlier in the session. The clutter appears to act as wallpaper; any new window opened opens up on top of the clutter. The background color has also changed from blue to black. I tried the suggestions; my comments follow the quotes.

You should be able to restart just the shell by hitting Alt + F2 then typing r and enter.

Shell restarts but desktop background is still cluttered.

You can also switch over to a console by hitting Ctrl+Alt+F2, for example, then log in and restart the shell from there

Logging in and typing "DISPLAY=0 gnome-shell --replace" yields the message: "Unable to open X display 0"

Have you looked at any logs yet?

No. I don't know what to look for or which logs to look at.

Subsequent to making the above observations, while attempting to post the above reply, I was prompted to log in again and discovered that some of my existing windows were trashed. I've noticed that almost all of these incidents have occurred when I have been surfing with Firefox. Could that be significant?

[Dies]

You may want to try the Nvidia driver.

As far as logs go, /var/log/Xorg*.log is a good place to start.

You can install gnome-system-log if it's not already installed. Makes it easy to browse /var/log/.

Btw, you're missing a semi-colon in front of the zero in that command, also your display number may be different.


In any case, it definitely sounds like a driver issue to me, I could be wrong of course but you lose nothing by trying the official driver.