On Mon, 16 Feb 1998, T. Sean (Theo) Schulze wrote:

> Whenever I am running X under my own account and I su to root in one of 
> the xterms, the left hand side of the screen shifts up one line.  The 
> shifted section is about as wide as my system prompt, and there is a 
> small one-line high bit of black and white at the bottom left-hand corner 
> of the screen.  All the icons and windows lying on the "fault line" get 
> shifted also, and I usually make the windows into icons or vice versa to 
> get most everything back to looking like it should.  Generally, I have to 
> do something to cause a screen redraw to make it go away completely.
> 
> I suspect what is happening is that somehow after I su, the new system 
> prompt is getting partially printed to the display.  Does anyone else 
> have this problem?  I don't see anything about this in the (April '97) 
> FAQ.  Can I do something to make this stop, or should I just live with 
> it?  I just noticed that even though xset has blanked the screen, when I 
> telneted in and su'd, the blanked screen shifted.

What is most likely happening is you're not running xconsole.  When you
su to root, a text line gets displayed on the system console, causing it
to scroll.

If you run xconsole, it will redirect all of the console output to a
xterm-like window, rather than displaying it directly, and this will
keep your display neat and tidy.

Check out the man page on xconsole for details.

> System Info:
> IIci running in 1.3 and the 1.3 X with 24MB RAM, 24MB swap on a Quantum 
> Maverick 540MB hard drive.  I am running X in color using the lkm and 
> color server.  I have an Apple High Resolution NUBUS board installed.  
> Kernel is GENERICSBC#56.

<Shameless Plug>
Nubus video?  Good.  Then your machine might actually be able to use my
SLOTMAN kernel and then you can run X in 8-bit color mode!  (It's a bit
slow, but quite useable.)
</Shameless Plug>

> I don't think the system has much to do with it though, because I used to 
> have this problem with the 1.2 ditribution too.

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