Re: Strange video between logins

[Rick Stevens <rstevens vitalstream com>]

Jack Fearnley wrote:
> I sent this to the list on 12 Aug but I never saw it appear.  I hope it makes 
> it this time.

It did. :-)

> I have just installed 7.3 on a machine which previously was running 7.2.  
> Everything works fine until I try to logout from one account (say root) and 
> into another account (eg jack).  At that point the screen looks 
> misconfigured, there is a band of orange about one inch deep across the top 
> with a lot of seemingly compressed detail in it.  The rest of the screen is 
> black upon which appears the login square, mostly black and white.  I have no 
> trouble logging into the next account and the screen reverts to normal as 
> soon as I log in.

Is it only the "jack" account causing this or does logging out as root
and going to ANY account cause it, too?

If it's just the "jack" account, have you done anything to the system
(put in a new video card, etc.) since the last time you use the
account in question?  If that's the case, check the account's home
directory for files that control the "X" session.  These files will
start with a ".", so you need to use "ls -a".  Check those files and
see if there's one that specifies a weird screen size, since it sounds
like it's specifying a frequency the monitor or video card can't
handle.

If you can't figure that out, then you _could_ delete the "jack" account
(don't remove the files, just the account), then re-create it.  That
_should_ rewrite the account's X startup files.
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- Rick Stevens, Senior Systems Engineer     rstevens vitalstream com -
- VitalStream, Inc.                       http://www.vitalstream.com -
-                                                                    -
-   Never test for an error condition you don't know how to handle.  -
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