y do my Linux applications flicker?
Wednesday, October 7th, 2009 at
10:13
i am using linux mint 5 and all of my applications like Google earth flicker and if i try to play a game it flickers 2 pleas help me :'(
Tagged with: earth • flicker • game • google • Linux • mint
Filed under: Linux Applications
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Are you using an ATI card? Some of the accelerated graphics aren’t supported. Or you could just have low memory.
Does Linux Mint use KDE? That’s pretty glitchy to begin with.
Bluntly — and I’m not on Linux Mint — either you don’t have enough memory for what you are doing or your X-Windows is configured wrong. I often run too many applications. The most expensive answer is buy more memory. The other answers are straightforward too.
Since Linux Mint is derived from Ubuntu, and Ubuntu is very closely related to Debian, I will pretty much assume that like them and unlike sensible distros (and I’m typing this on debian) it uses "dpkg-reconfigure" to alter the xorg.config file. xorg.config is a file, usually in your /etc/X11 directory, which tells X-windows what modules to use for screen display, or keyboard and mouse, what display resolutions your monitor will support and how to get them, etc. Usually it guesses them at installation and occasionally it guesses wrong. Frankly I find Debian (which, again I’m using to type this) and its derivatives guess wrong a little more often than other distros. First you need to know exactly what your keyboard, mouse, graphics card and monitor are. You can generally find out technical specs for your monitor from any documentation you got when you bought it — in particular you want horizontal and vertical sync if you can get them. If not you can usually search for the monitor and among all the offers to sell you one you will generally find a page somewhere which tells you what they are.
Also look up not just the name of your graphics card but the name of its driver in Linux. Usually it’s called a module. Once you have all that information, and here I’m flying a little blind, look at your xorg.config file. Try opening it with a text editor. It should open read-only. If you can’t, open a terminal and type "less /etc/X11/xorg.config" less is a program like more — you go down a file by typing the space bar, you go up the file by pressing the b key. Hunt for the monitor and Graphics cards. If the graphics card is right, it doesn’t matter if the monitor’s figures are a little bit different from what you have written down, as long as the numbers you have written down are within the range of the numbers in the file. If the two are different, and this is not something to do lightly, then in a terminal type "sudo dpkg-reconfigure xserver-xorg" — notice the sudo. You need root access for this — and answer the questions it asks you. When you have finished and saved it to disk, log off your x-server which you do either by selecting that option, rather than shut off or restart from your exit menu or by pressing ctl-alt-backspace (which just kills it) and when it starts it should be better.
The preferred method, which is nevertheless a hassle, is to switch to another desktop. If you are using Gnome, ANY other desktop takes up less memory. I use KDE on this and generally XFCE on my laptops. Fluxbox actually takes up very little memory, as does IceWM. I’ve used both. Gnome is the most n00bie-friendly desktop though. Fluxbox and IceWM are efficient but difficult to understand. XFCE consciously omits many of the features of Gnome and KDE for the sake of economy and efficiency. (I should mention I’m running KDE 3.x. I had a brief experience with KDE 4.0 at the start of August. Shudder. The Horror! The Horror!)
Anyhow those are your choices.