screen flashing to black every several seconds

[David Curry]

Claude Jones wrote:

> David Curry wrote:
>
>> Claude Jones wrote:
>>
>>> For no explainable reason, my graphic interface has gone crazy. It 
>>> flashes to black for a moment everal several seconds. Nothing else 
>>> seems to be affected. If I'm typing, words keep getting put in the 
>>> doc. Downloads continue, etc... I loaded some of the latest 
>>> patches/updates last night. Apart from that this machine was idle 
>>> all day. It's up on the net with Firestarter providing pretty strict 
>>> rules. I just tried downloading/installing the latest ATI Radeon 
>>> 9200 video driver from ATI. I searched the list for similar 
>>> behavior, but couldn't find anything. What could have changed in my 
>>> absence??? Have I been hacked by someone?
>>>
>> Claude, have you tried switching to a console window to see if the 
>> periodic flash to black occurs there as well?  Try ALT-F2 to see if 
>> the blackout continues and then ALT-F& to switch back to your X window.
>>
>> 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).