ghost borders appear in top-left of 8bit display with Human theme

Bug #59335 reported by Jörg Höhle
2
Affects Status Importance Assigned to Milestone
ubuntulooks (Ubuntu)
Invalid
Undecided
Unassigned

Bug Description

Binary package hint: gtk2-engines-ubuntulooks

Hi,

Ghost frames appear in the upper left of the 8bit desktop when opening menus or windows.

Although the machine has a 32bit display, I've been testing the 8bit mode. From within a vt console, I use
startx -- :1 -depth 8
The machine is
http://wiki.ubuntu.com/LaptopTestingTeam/FujitsuLifebookC1110

The attached pictures show several rendering errors. These errors appear when using the
  "Human",
  "Silicon" or
  "Outdoors" themes.
They go away when using other themes like
  "Mist",
  "Clearlooks",
  "Ocean Dream" or
  "LegacyHuman".
In particular, all screenshots were taken using my preferences, a
mixture of two themes:
window content: Human
window frame: Mist
icons: Human

The mere act of selecting one or the other icon set or window content theme makes rectangles appear intermittently in the top left corner!

o The bottommost blue line remains after selecting the top panel's application menu. It persists (or is redrawn?) across refreshes (even switching back and forth between vt2 (text console used to startx), vt7 (normal 32 bit session) and vt8 (8bit).

o Similarly, there's a blue vertical line in the top panel left over
after displaying the two other gnome menus ("Orte" and "System").

o Moving the window of the snapshot tool draws blue corners within its frame, see depth8-snapshot.png file attachment.

o Please notice how the menus have no frame. In fact, every time the blue border artifact appears, the corresponding menu has no frame!

o The picture depth8-blue-border.png reveals that the dimension of the blue rectangle that's drawn in the top left is a phantom exactly the size of the popup-menu that appears in the center of the screen.

Likewise, I see a blue rectangle appear just before the middle menu ("Orte") from the top panel is rendered, exactly the size of this menu.

o The Xserver crashed once while testing all of this. Sorry, I forgot the details. It'll hopefully go away when fixed.

Color issues:

o There's always a rectangular zone around the mouse pointer where the background picture colors are slightly changed (alas, the mouse is not visible in the attached snapshots).

o Similarly, the desktop icons for FTP, SMB, CD-ROM etc. reveal
rectangular areas around them where the background color is changed --
I thought the icon's background is transparent and would never appear.

o The picture depth8-menu shows the surprising two-color highlighting of the top panel's menu while the menu is selected. It looks weird and reduces readability.

o Also, this picture shows color artifacts for the title font of
active windows. Why is the background of "Bildschirmfoto speichern" greenish while the rest of the title is brown?

It's the same green as the square around the mouse pointer.

I'm using Ubuntu Dapper, with most latest security fixes and updates:
gtk-engines-xyz 1:2.7.4.is.2.6.10-0ubuntu1
xserver-xorg 7.0.0-ubuntu45
xserver-xorg-i810 1:1.4.1.4-0ubuntu6

Finally, there's a bug in the package description of
gtk2-engines-ubuntulooks. It says "Clearlooks". Presumably, the
description was copied from gtk2-engines-clearlooks.

Regards,
 Jörg Höhle

Revision history for this message
Jörg Höhle (joerg-cyril-hoehle) wrote : the ghost borders may destroy window contents

This attachment show an effect that's not systematic. It looks like sometimes there's a ghost border that remains atop all normal visible windows. Then when a window (e.g. the snapshot application's window) is moved, blue colors overwrites part of it.

This effect is different from the typical case where the ghost border is just drawn once while opening a menu.

Revision history for this message
Jörg Höhle (joerg-cyril-hoehle) wrote : color effects in the text of window title

This picture shows the color effects in the snapshot's window title and in the top panel's menu, as well as a superposition of blue ghost frames.

Revision history for this message
Jörg Höhle (joerg-cyril-hoehle) wrote : ghost border of popup menu

This picture shows the border less popup menu as well as the same size ghost border in the top left position of the desktop.

Revision history for this message
Daniel Holbach (dholbach) wrote :

Thanks for your bug report. Did you have a chance to test this with Edgy in the meantime? Which video driver do you use? Do you use compiz or beryl by chance? Does this happen with other themes also?

Changed in ubuntulooks:
assignee: nobody → desktop-bugs
status: Unconfirmed → Needs Info
importance: Undecided → Medium
Revision history for this message
Daniel Holbach (dholbach) wrote :

Could this be a duplicate of bug 34435?

Revision history for this message
Jörg Höhle (joerg-cyril-hoehle) wrote :

Daniel,
I assume you're talking about the blue border issue.
The video driver is i810 module version = 1.4.1 (laptop onboard Intel video chip).
I don't use compiz or beryl (never heard of). compiz is not installed, and beryl not found as package in Synaptic.
I don't believe it's related to bug #34435, as I've not observed any defects with buttons or scrollbars.
The other themes with the same symptoms are listed in the initial bug report (Human, Silicon, Outdoors).

Instead there seems to be a very clear relationship between the blue border and the windows of exactly the same size. I suspect the engine drawing code somehow gets that part of its drawing job wrong, somehow, and always uses coordinate 0,0 as upper left corner.

As the laptop's 4 partitions are currently all in use, I won't be able to test Edgy for some time.

As for the color parts of my bug report, I realize that I should have put that into a separate bug entry. X seems to do an extremely bad job on color allocation for 8bit displays on this laptop (hmm, I haven't tested the Suse partition on this laptop with 8bit). I'm surprised, because I've used 8bit color displays for a decade on SunOS & Solaris, and can't remember the visual impression being that bad.

Changed in ubuntulooks:
assignee: desktop-bugs → nobody
status: Needs Info → Unconfirmed
Revision history for this message
Daniel T Chen (crimsun) wrote :

I can't confirm this symptom in 9.04. Please set the status to:
1) New if reproducible in a supported or development Ubuntu version, or
2) Invalid if you cannot reproduce it in a supported or development Ubuntu version.

Changed in ubuntulooks:
importance: Medium → Undecided
status: New → Incomplete
Revision history for this message
Pedro Villavicencio (pedro) wrote :

We are closing this bug report because it lacks the information we need to investigate the problem, as described in the previous comments. Please reopen it if you can give us the missing information, and don't hesitate to submit bug reports in the future. To reopen the bug report you can click on the current status, under the Status column, and change the Status back to New. Thanks again!.

Changed in ubuntulooks:
status: Incomplete → Invalid
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