Comment 26 for bug 106060

Tormod,

Thank you VERY much for your quick and very informative reply to my note.

As a retired programmer, I appreciate the difficulties in diagnosing the real
causes of bugs. I will try to perform as many of the steps you requested as
I know how to do. I did not report this bug, but only confirmed that I had
also encountered it. Several other modules began rendering incorrectly at
the same time that this one became fatal to PCs and also affected my Mac,
although it does not freeze it up. My 350 MHz Mac actually displayed some
kind of molecule, but it took about a half-hour for the first one to appear!

I will try to be thorough and meticulous when running the tests, in order to
provide you the most factual results possible. I should be able to report
them to you in a few days. Thank you again for your interest in solving this.

Jerry (64)

 -------------- Original message ----------------------
From: Tormod Volden <email address hidden>
> "hack" = screensaver graphic/theme. This is slang used by the
> screensaver authors. The screensaver back-end (gnome-screensaver) just
> takes care of checking for keyboard activity etc and starts a program
> (the hack) that draws something on the screen. In fact, any program that
> just draws something on the screen can be used as a screensaver hack.
> The hack can be run standalone by running
> "/usr/lib/xscreensaver/molecule" but will then just run in a window. To
> test it fullscreen, add the option "-root". But since this will draw on
> the "root" window which often is hidden by desktop backgrounds etc, try
> this is in a "failsafe terminal session" from the login screen.
>
> Most of the hacks used by gnome-screensaver come from the "xscreensaver"
> source package. Ted referred to him changing this bug's attributes,
> reassigning it to "xscreensaver" so that the relevant developers and bug
> triagers are noticed about your bug report.
>
> If one particular hack makes the computer crash it is probably a bug in
> the graphic card driver, triggered by the hack. So usually these bugs
> end up in the collection of bug reports for the graphic driver in
> question. The hack makes drawing requests to the graphic subsystem (X11
> and for 3D graphics in particular, using the "mesa" libraries) and, in
> principle, none of these requests (faulty or not) should hang the
> machine.
>
> Fixing bugs in the card drivers is generally out of scope for the Ubuntu
> development (limited manpower and thus hard priority decisions), but we
> try to analyze and isolate the problems, and if we can collect enough
> details, we forward the bug "upstream", to the developers of the X11
> graphic drivers on bugs.freedesktop.org
>
> Can you all please run "lspci -nn | grep VGA" so that we can identify
> which cards have this exact problem? Can you reproduce it running
> molecule stand-alone? In window? Fullscreen?
>
> You can force your AGP cards to run PCI instead with the "ForcePCIMode"
> device option in /etc/X11/xorg.conf. Please try this, and verify in
> /var/log/Xorg.0.log that the option was correctly applied.
>
> ** Changed in: xscreensaver (Ubuntu)
> Assignee: (unassigned) => Tormod Volden (tormodvolden)
> Status: Confirmed => Incomplete
>
> --
> Selecting the Molecule screensaver makes the PC freeze. It is completely
> unresponsive.
> https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/106060
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> of the bug.