Installed Red Hat 7, default KDE workstation on a DELL GX100, Celeron 566, 128 mb RAM, i810 chipset. Graphical install finds video adapter and Dell E550 monitor with no problem, but there is condierable flicker and slow redraw including occaisional blackouts to the screen, to the point of giving me quite a headache while trying to find a workaround. To insure it was not hardware failure I tryed it on 3 different boxes that have no video issues with Windows NT 4 or Red Hat 6.2 upgraded to 2.2.16-3, and tried several monitors (Princeton Ultra Scan 52, Viewsonic A70). Tried "NoAccel" option from the XFree86 info regarding the i810 chipset, but did not help.
Found a passable fix for desktop apps, run "Xconfigurator --nodri" and it runs rock solid, but obviously no acceleration.
The --nodri option only turns off the 3D acceleration features.
Yes, I understand that, but it has solved the problem, the machines are quite usable now, tried this on four different boxes and the flicker problem is gone. Don't know what the relationship to the DRI module and the driver is, but something in that relationship seems to cause the problem.
I had the very same problem, tried commenting out 'Load "dri"' from XF86Config- 4 as suggested above and the problems went away. I had "flashing" everywhere, the most annoying were gnome control center (flashing at every new selection of an element of the left tree) and netscape mail composer (every single character I typed made the white background of the email to turn black and then white very quickly). [ i810, PhilipsBrilliance150P ]