[NBLUG/talk] A very strange display problem

[Lincoln Peters]

This happened on my primary desktop (running Debian/Etch), when I clicked 
the "Edit" menu in OpenOffice, although I'm not at all convinced that the 
timing is anything but a coincidence.  When I clicked on it, the screen froze 
completely.  So I went to my laptop, and found that I could still SSH into 
the desktop (obviously it was still working even if the display was messed 
up).  I ran "top", and saw that the Xorg process was using as much CPU as the 
system would give it--most likely a bug leading to an infinite loop.

I tried to terminate Xorg (as per "kill <pid>"), but that didn't do anything.  
Then I tried killing it (as per "kill -9 <pid>").  That got it to actually 
stop, but my display was still messed up.  Specifically, my primary screen 
was still frozen, but my secondary screen showed a GDM login screen!  I had 
to reboot to get the primary display working again!


I found the following lines in /var/log/Xorg.0.log.old:

Could not init font path element unix/:7100, removing from list!
AUDIT: Fri Mar 16 20:41:04 2007: 28903 X: client 2 rejected from local host

I looked in /var/log/kern*, and didn't find anything that seemes relevant 
(although I did find some strange messages involving a kernel BUG message and 
Xorg, but they're over a week old and I can't remember if I observed anything 
odd at the time).

I remember this happening one time before, but I can't remember the 
circumstances surrounding it (and I don't remember finding anything useful in 
the logs).  I don't remember exactly when it happened, so I can't be sure if 
it's connected to the BUG messages in the old kernel logs.


Any thoughts?  Should I be suspicious of the video card my primary display is 
attached to (it's an ATI Radeon 9200 AGP)?  Should I add it to the list of 
things that need to go when I replace the motherboard?


-- 
Lincoln Peters		<sampln at sbcglobal.net>

"If you ever want to get anywhere in politics, my boy, you're going to
have to get a toehold in the public eye."