leyton.org

I stumbled on a bit of a problem that had me baffled. My setup was this:

* I'd upgraded to 2.4.4-4GB (Suse Linux 7.2 default kernel, i believe, but i'm running SuSE 7.1)
* I'd installed XFree86 4.1 (xf86-4.1.0-6.rpm to be precise), and am already running KDE 2.1.2, so I was looking to get nice anti-aliased fonts.
* I have a Toshiba Satellite Pro 4200, and my X setup is using the Savage driver.

The problem was that on invoking StarOffice 5.2, the entire machine would crash. Bizarre. Not just X, Not Staroffice, the entire box. So a reset was in order. After a while this became rather frustrating, as Word and Vmware were beckoning as the only alternative, and my filesystem was beginning to look a little battle-worn.

This afternoon, I had to start working on a document, so I figured I’d give the problem one last look.

I tried logging in to another machine (running a similair setup), and running Staroffice there, with the display coming back (via SSH tunneling). The same thing happened.

Likewise, a colleague logged into my machine, and sent the display back to his machine (running XFree86 3.3 or somesuch), and HIS machine crashed.

All very bizarre. Invoking google, I began searching around, and stumbled on a page which described a problem with graphics hardware i originally thought was different from my own, but is in fact the Savage driver (a case of read the ****ing config!). Essentially, it boils down to setting

export SALDONOTUSEINVERT50=true

in your environment (or /etc/profile if you want to do it for everyone). I tried this, and everything returned to normality. No clear explanation seems to be given about what this variable does exactly, but it solves the problem with the entire machine crashing. Give it a whirl if you’re suffering too, but aren’t certain it applies to your specific hardware.

Richard Leyton, 13th July 2001, London. richard[at]leyton[dot]org – http://www.leyton.org

This entry was posted on Friday, July 13th, 2001 at 6:20 pm and is filed under Technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.