Re: Gnome Shell display white screen and blurred windows

[Owen Taylor <otaylor redhat com>]

On Fri, 2009-05-01 at 23:26 +0200, Mads Villadsen wrote:
> On Thu, 2009-04-16 at 21:24 +0200, Mads Villadsen wrote:
> > On Wed, 2009-04-15 at 15:24 +0200, Stephen Young wrote:
> > > I am running Ubuntu Intrepid, I have compiz installed but stop it
> > > before launching gnome-shell.  I am running on an HP nx9420 with ATI
> > > x1600 graphics, using the restricted driver that ships with Ubuntu.
> > > 
> > > Are there any logs that I could attach to help diagnose the problem?
> > 
> > I am having the same issues, but only when running gnome-shell
> > --replace. If I run it in Xephyr, then everything is fine (although a
> > bit slow).
> > 
> > I am using metacity, Fedora 11 Beta on a Dell Latitude D820 with Intel
> > 945GM graphics.
> 
> Are there only the two us experiencing this problem?
> 
> Is there anyone who has any idea as to what more information I can
> provide to help debug this?

I don't think the two problems are at all related; your report sounds
like a mesa bug:

 http://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=496515

Try the referenced package from koji.fedoraproject.org. (It, or
something newer, should land in F11 soon.)

For the fglrx problem - well, problems have been reported before.
gnome-shell works reasonably well with the open source Radeon drivers,
so there's no real reason to use fglrx for an r5xx like the x1600.
(Hopefully we'll have open source 3D support for r6xx/r7xx soon too.)

To figure out what is going on with fglrx is generally a pretty hard
thing because it *is* a closed source. So you basically are trying to
reverse engineer:

 - Compiz doesn't trigger this problem
 - gnome-shell triggers this problem
 - What are they doing differently? 

And the problem could well be some fglrx bug that Compiz just doesn't
happen to trigger. 

(It could also be some gnome-shell/mutter bug, of course, that just
happens to work with the open source drivers and the nVidia proprietary
drivers.)

There's not a lot that can be done at the level of attaching a log; if
someone wants to dive in and debug I can try to try provide some hints
at what to look at.

- Owen