First you need to find out what cards you have and what driver they are using.


Do 

lspci -v

and look for lines including VGA. That will tell you what cards you have and
what module  (=driver) you have loaded. You may  need the ati or nvidia
propietary drivers which generally do not get installed by default due to 
licence issues.



On Tue, 15 Jun 2010 04:32:47 -0500, Nagaraj Panyam wrote
> Hi,
> 
> We have a strange problem about graphics display. Our users run 
> GEANT4 on a remote server and view the display on local desktop 
> using x11forwarding.
> 
> In the forwarded display GEANT4 display on the desktops, the 
> particle tra cks appear Ok, but the detector outline is missing, we 
> tried changing colors,
> 
> etc. The remote server is SL4 and the desktop is SL5. This problem 
> was no t there when the same desktops were running SL4. I paste an 
> expert's opinio n here.
> 
> > This situation almost always means that you have the wrong driver for
> > your graphics card. The driver you have is correctly handling polylines
> 
> > (hence trajectories are working) but is not properly handling polygons
> > (hence detector geometry is not working).
> >
> > The solution is to figure out exactly which graphics card you have and
> > then download the specific driver from the graphics card manufacturer.
> >
> 
> I am stumped. The graphics driver was auto detected at install time, 
> and I trust that the driver is fine because there doesn't seem to be 
> any proble m with any other display. How do I verify that indeed the 
> driver is the problem? Or any other workaround? If indeed the driver 
> needs to be change d, how do I go about it?
> 
> Infact, the display problem started appearing on desktops with different
> models of graphics cards, after upgrade to SL5,so its not related to 
> any one model.
> 
> Thanks
> Nagaraj


 Alex Finch, Research Fellow, Physics Department, Lancaster University.
+44 (0) 1524 593618   http://www.lancs.ac.uk/depts/physics/staff/finch.htm