No more video garbage

Good news to all Kubuntu and Fedora users. The cause for the video garbage appearing whenever a new window is opened has been discovered. A custom patch to xorg is causing the trouble. Now we can only hope that the distributions will provide updates for xorg without this patch. If you don’t want to wait that long and you are a Kubuntu user just add the following ppa to your sources.list and upgrade your system:

deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/adamspain/ubuntu intrepid main

The interesting thing is that NVIDIA knew about this patch for at least one month and started to work around it in their drivers. That’s great as it shows that they care about KDE and want to improve the KDE experience. The bad is that they did not communicate that a custom patch to xorg is responsible for the problem. Neither in KDE’s nor in Ubuntu’s bug report there is a comment from NVIDIA. And that’s sad. With a little bit more communication the problem would have been solved much earlier.

16 Replies to “No more video garbage”

  1. After speaking with fedora’s X maintainer, neither he (or I) am convinced that removing the aforementioned patch is the best way forward. It’s there for good reason, else compositing performance suffers significantly.

    I’ll comment further on kde’s bugzilla.

  2. @Red Dieter: thanks for the Info. But I cannot notice any difference. CPU usage does not increase, everything seems fine (using the CPU plasmoid).

    It’s always difficult to say what’s worse. I’d say the video garbage is worse than a little bit more CPU usage.

  3. Well I only had this problem with GTK programs anyways. Such as firefox and thunderbird. But seems it’s fixed in the 180.16 beta drivers from Nvidia.

  4. I am holding off upgrading to the KDE 4 series until 4.2 (running hardy for now) hope this makes it into the official kubuntu upgrades before then.

  5. @Adolf
    The fps bug isn’t a really bug. Search please at launchpad for this and jaunty. In short:
    It’s cause by a misconfiguration of access rights of /dev/dri/card[0-9]
    Setting the rights to 666 will solve this temporary. For enduring solution luck at launchpad

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