I have this weird issue with my monitor. How can I fix it?

Solution 1:

Looking at this part of your question: P4M890 [S3 UniChrome Pro] I noticed you had a video card that is in the group of the OpenChrome drivers. There is some good news and bad news. The Bad news is that it has many graphic related issues. you can see several of them (Most for the 3D graphics part) here: https://help.ubuntu.com/community/OpenChrome

The good news are the following:

On the same link provided above: https://help.ubuntu.com/community/OpenChrome you can see that there is a compiling from source workaround that "probably" could work for the 3D part.

There is also some workaround fixed to disable 3D altogether. By editing the xorg.conf: and adding the following:

Section "Module"
        Disable    "dri"
EndSection

(there are a couple of more xorg.conf edits in the link provided)

There is also a ticket system for bugs detected: http://www.openchrome.org/trac/report/1

(Some of the tickets have ideas and comments about how to fix some of the problems)

Lastly, if not downloaded already (It should be downloaded since it is done by default), download the xserver-xorg-video-openchrome package. And tell xorg.conf to use the following driver in the Device Section:

Driver "openchrome"

One final note, some links point to downloading the proprietary VIA driver for this from here: http://linux.via.com.tw/support/downloadFiles.action for what I could see it is very abandonware since the only one I found there was the 9.04 version driver.

Anyway you have several options that might help, others that might help and a little bit more complicated and the last ones which are just to eliminate 3D completely.

If the file xorg.conf is not found, you can created by doing the following:

1. Boot the system in Recovery Mode. You can do this by pressing ESC or leaving the SHIFT key pressed until the GRUB menu appears. Select Recovery Mode (Should be second option).

2. After booting go to the terminal as root. There is an option that tells you if you want to log in the terminal.

3. Type X -configure. The X is in upper case. This will create the file xorg.conf.new in your current home directory.

4. Test to see if the file is working by doing this X -config xorg.conf.new. If a gui environment appears and looks good then you can do the following step. If not, I suggest editing the xorg file and changing anything you need until it looks good. You can edit with nano: nano xorg.conf.net doing any modifications and save by pressing CTRL+X and pressing Y to save and quit.

5. Copy the new xorg file: cp xorg.conf.new /etc/X11/xorg.conf

6. type exit or reboot to test it out.