  We investigate the nonequilibrium roughening transition of a one-dimensional
restricted solid-on-solid model by directly sampling the stationary probability
density of a suitable order parameter as the surface adsorption rate varies.
The shapes of the probability density histograms suggest a typical
Ginzburg-Landau scenario for the phase transition of the model, and estimates
of the "magnetic" exponent seem to confirm its mean-field critical behaviour.
We also found that the flipping times between the metastable phases of the
model scale exponentially with the system size, signaling the breaking of
ergodicity in the thermodynamic limit. Incidentally, we discovered that a
closely related model not considered before also displays a phase transition
with the same critical behaviour as the original model. Our results support the
usefulness of off-critical histogram techniques in the investigation of
nonequilibrium phase transitions. We also briefly discuss in an appendix a good
and simple pseudo-random number generator used in our simulations.
