I’m using Ubuntu 8.04 with the ati driver. Everything works fine except for blender, it flickers when showing blender. Does anybody know how to stop the flicker?
You can search thru my related issues. I’m assuming your talking about the flickering 3d views? If so search my recent posts. I posted the same issue in regards to Vista 64. See if its the same thing your talking about here…then watch for an answer.
If all else fails, try enableing the Frame Sync options from your graphic card, that will force the rendering to only refresh at the same rate as the monitor.
If frame sync is already on, try turning it off.
Blender also seems to hate AA,MPAA,FSAA, and every other type of real time over sampleing, make sure you have this off when running blender.
Compiz also might be causing this, try installing another window manager like fluxbox, or IceWM, then Log-out, and on the log in screen look for the “sessions” menu.Click on that and select the window manager you installed and try running blender. (or simply disable the compositing special effects)
Thanks turning off the special effects fixed. 
Hi,
I have the same problem: when my “special effects” are enabled on my laptop and I open blender, my blender screen shows and disappears a couple of times really quickly.
When I turn special effects of, Blender opens normally and doesn’t flicker. BUT: my alt-button doesn’t seem to work then.
Usually I use alt-button and left mouse to navigate in blender (to orbit around the object). But this doesn’t work. Does anyone know how to fix this?
(When special effects is enabled, i can use alt and left mouse normally in blender…)
This was a “known issue” with the linux ati driver, although they didn’t actually mention it in the release notes. It took me ages searching the web for solutions to this problem before finding out it was a known issue with compositing and opengl applications.
Anyway, the good news is it now works without flicker with the new ati driver, released a couple of days ago.