Ubuntu
xserver-xorg-video-r128 package

  1. Bug #106060
  2. Comment #25

Comment 25 for bug 106060

Revision history for this message
Tormod Volden (tormodvolden) wrote : Re: Selecting the Molecule screensaver makes the PC freeze. It is completely unresponsive.

"hack" = screensaver graphic/theme. This is slang used by the screensaver authors. The screensaver back-end (gnome-screensaver) just takes care of checking for keyboard activity etc and starts a program (the hack) that draws something on the screen. In fact, any program that just draws something on the screen can be used as a screensaver hack. The hack can be run standalone by running "/usr/lib/xscreensaver/molecule" but will then just run in a window. To test it fullscreen, add the option "-root". But since this will draw on the "root" window which often is hidden by desktop backgrounds etc, try this is in a "failsafe terminal session" from the login screen.

Most of the hacks used by gnome-screensaver come from the "xscreensaver" source package. Ted referred to him changing this bug's attributes, reassigning it to "xscreensaver" so that the relevant developers and bug triagers are noticed about your bug report.

If one particular hack makes the computer crash it is probably a bug in the graphic card driver, triggered by the hack. So usually these bugs end up in the collection of bug reports for the graphic driver in question. The hack makes drawing requests to the graphic subsystem (X11 and for 3D graphics in particular, using the "mesa" libraries) and, in principle, none of these requests (faulty or not) should hang the machine.

Fixing bugs in the card drivers is generally out of scope for the Ubuntu development (limited manpower and thus hard priority decisions), but we try to analyze and isolate the problems, and if we can collect enough details, we forward the bug "upstream", to the developers of the X11 graphic drivers on bugs.freedesktop.org

Can you all please run "lspci -nn | grep VGA" so that we can identify which cards have this exact problem? Can you reproduce it running molecule stand-alone? In window? Fullscreen?

You can force your AGP cards to run PCI instead with the "ForcePCIMode" device option in /etc/X11/xorg.conf. Please try this, and verify in /var/log/Xorg.0.log that the option was correctly applied.