Video anomalies

[pwabrahams]

I've been experiencing various annoying video anomalies. In OpenOffice Help, for instance, large spaces sometimes appear between lines. In the Spider solitaire game, ghost cards appear at the bottom of columns. And when typing input within Firefox (such as this very post), the cursor sometimes just jumps up a line or to some random point in the preceding text (though this might be a different problem). Usually I can clear these anomalies by moving the window, but they keep coming back.

What can I do about this? System settings / Display doesn't have anything useful that I can find.

I'm running on an Asus laptop.

[Guest]

Re: Video anomalies

If your laptop has an intel card, this may be a known issue with intel cards and compositing (kwin effects). See here for the bug in launchpad:

https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+s...el/+bug/661910

I must add that the solution suggested in the case didn't work for me.

[jeremy1701]

Re: Video anomalies

I would start by disabling desktop-effects if you have them enabled.

[sithlord48]

Re: Video anomalies

if you don't have a intel card, (even if you do ) please tell us what video card you have, and if you have installed proprietary drivers for it

[pwabrahams]

Video card info and driver

if you don't have a intel card, (even if you do ) please tell us what video card you have, and if you have installed proprietary drivers for it

Where can I find that information (card, drivers)? It isn't in System Settings as far as I can tell. System Settings / Display tells me that the display is an LVDS1 (never heard of that before) with a resolution of 1366x768 (seems right but also new to me) and a refresh rate of 60.0 Hz. Nothing much more. Kinfocenter is of no help either.

[sithlord48]

Re: Video anomalies

run lshw from the konsole , and post the video section.

[pwabrahams]

lshw output

Here it is:

*-display:0
       description: VGA compatible controller
       product: Mobile 4 Series Chipset Integrated Graphics Controller
       vendor: Intel Corporation
       physical id: 2
       bus info: pci@0000:00:02.0
       version: 09
       width: 64 bits
       clock: 33MHz
       capabilities: vga_controller bus_master cap_list rom
       configuration: driver=i915 latency=0
       resources: irq:45 memory:fe400000-fe7fffff memory:d0000000-dfffffff ioport:dc00(size=8)
    *-display:1 UNCLAIMED
       description: Display controller
       product: Mobile 4 Series Chipset Integrated Graphics Controller
       vendor: Intel Corporation
       physical id: 2.1
       bus info: pci@0000:00:02.1
       version: 09
       width: 64 bits
       clock: 33MHz
       capabilities: bus_master cap_list
       configuration: latency=0
       resources: memory:fe800000-fe8fffff

[pwabrahams]

xserver-xorg-video-intel

I've tried replacing xserver-xorg-video-intel with the Glasen version. spider solitaire still has anomalies, as I discovered fairly quickly.

[sithlord48]

Re: Video anomalies

you might want to take a look at pixavi's responce above since you have in intel card

[pwabrahams]

Glasen PPA

you might want to take a look at pixavi's responce above since you have in intel card

The post pixavi directed us to recommends the Glasen PPA. which as I mentioned above seems not to solve the problem.

Update: after installing the Glasen PPA and rebooting, the graphical interface was completely gone -- I got just a blank screen. I managed to get a shell window and get rid of the Glasen stuff, but I had a hell of a time doing it because I'm not used to package manipulation in command mode.

[GreyGeek]

Re: Video anomalies

I have that chip in my Sony VAIO VGN-FW140E, except that it is "version: 07", not "09".

For a while in the spring of 2009 my chip was giving ghosting images like that as well, but subsequent upgrades to the i915 video driver resolved them. For a couple months I ran VESA framebuffering and couldn't do 3D stuff like Stellarium or Tux Racer, etc...

I filed a bug report and worked with the dev team for a month or so until they resolved the problem. You can do so here: https://bugs.freedesktop.org/