X Crashes with Certain KDE Games

10/3/2008

The Problem

I'm using Slackware 12.1 which has KDE 3.5.9 and X11v7.3 (X.Org server 1.4.0.90). My video card is an Intel i810 (82810) motherboard VGA at the default 24-bit color depth. I've tried both the video driver that came with Slackware 12.1 (xf86-video-intel-2.2.1) and the latest I could find (xf86-video-intel-2.4.2). When I try to play certain games and launch certain applications, X crashes leaving a pattern on the screen and there's no way to get out. I can ssh into the machine and reboot, so it's running.

The games and applications in question include:

• Kolf
• KAtomic
• KBounce (crashes X at game end)
• KSokoban
• Qt Designer 3.3.8b (designer)
• KAsteroids (Occasionally. Might be a memory issue.)

The Solution

Start X in 8-bit color depth mode like this:

startx -- -depth 8

Then the games and apps in question will work. You might also want to try 16-bit mode. I was unable to as X crashed immediately after starting.

Additional Info

I dug pretty deeply into the code and the problem seems to be related to the older XAA 2D acceleration technology (XFree86 Acceleration Architecture). Since this is being replaced by EXA, this may just go away eventually.

I've also noted that I cannot start X in 16-bit color mode. X crashes immediately on launch. The log claims that DRI only works in 16-bit color mode. If I knew what DRI was, I might care about this.

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