Display randomly goes into wrong position

Question

Running Xubuntu 14.04 on a Mac Mini, using open source ATI driver (more info below).

After some time running in Xorg, the display 'rearranges' itself so the beginning and the end of the screen (at least, horizontally) are in the wrong place.

Restarting the X server does not appear to do anything (if I kill X entirely, the terminal has the same display issue ... it starts at the wrong place).

Rebooting the system fixes up the problem.

Not sure what to call this issue - where should I start looking?

artist rendition

lshw -c video reports:

*-display UNCLAIMED     
   description: VGA compatible controller
   product: Whistler [Radeon HD 6630M/6650M/6750M/7670M/7690M]
   vendor: Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. [AMD/ATI]
   physical id: 0
   bus info: pci@0000:01:00.0
   version: 00
   width: 64 bits
   clock: 33MHz
   capabilities: pm pciexpress msi vga_controller bus_master cap_list
   configuration: latency=0
   resources: memory:90000000-9fffffff memory:a8800000-a881ffff ioport:2000(size=256) memory:a8820000-a883ffff
  *-display UNCLAIMED
   description: Display controller
   product: 2nd Generation Core Processor Family Integrated Graphics Controller
   vendor: Intel Corporation
   physical id: 2
   bus info: pci@0000:00:02.0
   version: 09
   width: 64 bits
   clock: 33MHz
   capabilities: msi pm cap_list
   configuration: latency=0
   resources: memory:a8000000-a83fffff memory:a0000000-a7ffffff ioport:3000(size=64)

Download your video driver from the official page and install them after you remove the open-source drivers. It is a graphical install, it should be easy provided that you find support for Linux drivers for your video card in there. — Taz D., Sep 19 '14 at 07:58
@floppy I wasn't able to get the official fglrx video drivers to work at all (be it from package repo or built from source). Is the answer simply that the open source drivers are not suitable? — az_, Sep 22 '14 at 23:24
Oh, right, you're running the famous Ubuntu 14.04. Open-source drivers for version 14.04 come together with some video patch to make them work. Trying to install official drivers won't work without the patch and they wont help you with that one. Nevertheless, you can install official ATI drivers if you decide to do a fresh install of Ubuntu 12.04.5 which is an excellent distro with a very stable kernel, the best one in the series in my opinion. To fix your video drivers in Ubuntu 14.04 follow the instructions in my reply to your question bellow. — Taz D., Sep 23 '14 at 08:13

score 1 · Accepted Answer · edited Apr 13 '17 at 12:25

Because Ubuntu 14.04 open source drivers come together with a peculiar video patch, the chances to install official drivers for ATI cards are slim sometimes and not so slim other times. I was under the impression that this patch error affects only NVIDIA video cards but it seems that ATI video cards can have the same issues.

Sometimes open source drivers work like a charm with ATI cards, and sometimes you get funny results like in your case. To fix the problem you are supposed to remove your ATI drivers from your system, remove xorg.conf, and after that reinstall xorg completely and finally reconfigure Xorg.

All this operations are better performed in the console terminal, and to get to the console you have to press Ctrl+Alt+F1 at login prompt, and login with your username and password. So it would be better to write down these commands on some piece of paper before actually running them.

  sudo apt-get purge fglrx*

  sudo rm /etc/X11/xorg.conf

And to reinstall xorg completely:

  sudo apt-get install --reinstall xserver-xorg-core libgl1-mesa-glx:i386 libgl1-mesa-dri:i386 libgl1-mesa-glx:amd64 libgl1-mesa-dri:amd64

immediately followed by:

  sudo dpkg-reconfigure xserver-xorg

and finally

  sudo reboot

The following is a well documented guide addressed to fixing the proprietary ATI drivers, the one I used to address your problem. I have no idea whether it will work for you, I never used ATI video cards but I think you should also read the comments to this guide because there are a few interesting suggestions in there too.

Display randomly goes into wrong position

1 Answers1