Re: screen flashing to black every several seconds

Claude Jones wrote:

David Curry wrote:

Have you recently applied X.org updates to your system?

Console is stable. X.org was updated by yum update two nights ago.

In similar circumstances, I would be suspicious that the X.org update was the root of the problem if the problem started before downloading/installing the ATI video Driver. If the blanking was noticed after installation of the ATI driver, then I would suspect a mismatch between that driver and your fedora system. It has been a while since I looked at the ATI site, but unless things have changed the ATI drivers are only available in binary packages and compiled for an earlier kernel than that used by fedora core 2 or 3 and compiled for use on the XFree86.org window system. I expect the experts will correct me if I am wrong here, but I *think* it may be best to stick with drivers built for the xorg-x11 X Window system provided with FC2 and 3. Further, you should be aware that several fedora users have reported problems using ATI 3D cards.

In any event, you might want to double check your system's video card and monitor settings. I *think* you can do that from a terminal command line by entering system-config-display as root (using su - to setup proper path environment).

I uninstalled the Radeon driver this am, and in the process it said it found an incompatibility between itself and an xorg lib with an '.so' ending, if that makes sense - it was about 4 am and I failed to write down the info. The problem remains. So, I'm thinking that I should revert to the previous xorg version (the current one has an ati video driver update included, according to what I read), and then reinstall the current version??? Does that make sense? If so, any suggestion about how to roll back an xorg version? Will the rpm -e do it?

Uninstalling x.org and reinstalling sounds reasonable to me. You might want to review rpm and yum commands before deciding between the two. But, I *think* exiting the X window system and running rpm -e <xorg base package> from a console followed by yum install <xorg base package> would do it.