Problem rendering text and icons (FC6)

[paddage]

Hi all,

I've three FC6 machines on my home LAN, all updated to the latest from yum, one i686, one single-core x86_64, one dual-core x86_64, two of them wired, one wireless.

On one of them (the wireless single core 64-bit one) it's recently developed a habit of not drawing the text properly. So when I fire up OpenOffice, all I get in the menus is a bunch of underscores. Firefox shows underscores for the menu items and for hyperlinks and nothing at all for text. Action buttons in dialogs aren't there until I roll my mouse over them and that goes for nautilus windows, too. Text is displayed in Firefox if I force a redraw of the window by scrolling or maximising it.

It's only parts of windows that have text in them (which is why I hoped the xfs update would help), so in gkrellm, the monitors all merrily scroll sidewise until they hit the part where text should be and is now blank.

I've got the latest nvidia drivers installed (the machine has a GeForce 6600 GT), the xfs update that came out a couple of days ago, I've re-created xorg.conf, I don't use compiz or beryl or anything of that ilk and I don't have a clue what to do next except reinstall, which will be a pain.

Anybody seen anything like this or have some advice about diagnosing the root cause?

[Dies]

Screenshot *might* help.

Also, this is with the default theme right?

[paddage]

Originally Posted by Dies

Screenshot *might* help.

Also, this is with the default theme right?

Yeah, sorry, it occured to me after posting that a shot might help...
Here's one of oowriter that shows it:



I do use the default theme but I don't think it's a gnome issue - I subsequently installed Xfce and tried that and I get the same problems. (Which I guess means it could be a GTK issue...)

[Dies]

Wow, that's crazy.

I see the menu on the panel displays correctly, are you using the same font throughout or do you have different fonts set up, have you tried other fonts and are the results the same?

Also have you tried completely un-installing the nvidia drivers then re-installing them, or even temporarily switching to the vesa driver just to rule it out.

Sorry I don't have any better ideas for you, hopefully someone has seen this before.

BTW if you do end up having to re-install make sure you grab the latest or at least 7 since 6 is EOL now.

[PabloTwo]

If this happened immediatlely after installing the newest and latest Nvidia drivers for your 6600 GT, I would uninstall that driver and reinstall the previous Nvidia driver version you were using on that machine to either eliminate or incriminate the new driver as the culprit. If the new video driver is determined to not be the problem, then I'd most likely suspect a gtk problem too.

You could remove then reinstall some of the major gtk packages in an attempt to flush out the corrupt code, if indeed that is the problem, but before removing any packages using either rpm or yum, I'd insure that yum was still working for me in order to be able to reinstall without a lot of extra hassle. As Dies pointed out, FC6 as now at "end of life". I also run FC6, and though the fedora-updates and fedora-extras repos were working as of yesterday (last time I checked), I had to disable the fedora-core repo a week or so ago in order to get yum to continue working at all. Appearently the official FC6 fedora-core mirrorlist is now out of play and that's the first repo yum attempts to hit and when it fails yum just exits with an error message. Set enabled=0 in the fedora-core.repo file so yum won't halt and exit, or find a working fc6 fedora-core mirror site on the web and plug that url into the repo baseurl and commnet out the mirrorlist line.

You could use:

rpm -qa | grep GTK
rpm -qa | grep gtk

to see the major/minor gtk related packages installed on your system. If you decide to follow this path, I'd first remove then yum reinstall the biggie "gtk2". I truly hope the solution to your delima doesn't take this type of drastic house cleaning. Then, there's always that "other" suggestion.... to upgrade to 7 or 8.

edit: Does this happen when you log is as root also? If so, the problem is global. If it only happens in your regular user account, then the problem is confined to some messed up configuration file in your home directory, in which case wholesale removal and reinstalling packages won't make any improvement.

Paul

[paddage]

Originally Posted by Dies

Wow, that's crazy.

That's what I thought

Originally Posted by Dies

BTW if you do end up having to re-install make sure you grab the latest or at least 7 since 6 is EOL now.

Will do. I'll look to grab FC8 and install this weekend.

[paddage]

Originally Posted by PabloTwo

If this happened immediatlely after installing the newest and latest Nvidia drivers for your 6600 GT, I would uninstall that driver and reinstall the previous Nvidia driver version you were using on that machine to either eliminate or incriminate the new driver as the culprit. If the new video driver is determined to not be the problem, then I'd most likely suspect a gtk problem too.

I suspect it's not the driver as I've done at least one and I think two updates since the problem first appeared. I'm not sure exactly when it started because this is the offsprings' computer and some of them are a bit tardy in passing on information about what doesn't work...

Originally Posted by PabloTwo

You could remove then reinstall some of the major gtk packages in an attempt to flush out the corrupt code, if indeed that is the problem

I suspect an upgrade to a newer FC will be the more time-efficient approach.

Originally Posted by PabloTwo

I had to disable the fedora-core repo a week or so ago in order to get yum to continue working at all.

Just tried now and it was all fine - nothing to update but it happily went off and grabbed the primary.xml.gz for core.

Originally Posted by PabloTwo

Does this happen when you log is as root also? If so, the problem is global. If it only happens in your regular user account, then the problem is confined to some messed up configuration file in your home directory, in which case wholesale removal and reinstalling packages won't make any improvement.

Sure - haven't tried as root but it affects every non-root login we've tried so it's not just one user's .gwhatever being screwed.

Paddy

[paddage]

Well, I'm pretty sure I know what the answer is now - it's the graphics card, or specifically a 6600GT card in an AMD64 system. Why it suddenly started playing up I don't know but it's clearly got a problem in and out of X.

I backed up everything (as you do), burned an x86_64 FC8 install DVD and was ready to go. Unfortunately, when it booted I was presented with a screen in which every character on the screen was something a lot like random noise (couldn't take a screenshot unfortunately) but imagine one of the non-printing chars from ASCII and you're pretty much there. This was in text mode so it was clearly not GTK at fault or X for that matter.

I came across this post from an Ubuntu forum from 2005 with pretty much the same symptoms and setup: AMD64, nvidia 6600GT, screwed up display, and apparently it was an nvidia driver error.

Anyway, all is good using the nv driver rather than the nvidia driver except for a bit of garbled text on boot-up which quickly resolves itself. That's why I think this is a problem with the hardware combination: there's no problem if I remove the card and use the onboard graphics chips.

I'll head on over to nvidia's site and see if there's a new firmware or similar for the card and if Asus have an updated bios. Then comes the fun of trying to flash them without windows or floppy drive!

[PabloTwo]

there's no problem if I remove the card and use the onboard graphics chips.

Which brings up the question: Did you disable the onboard graphics chip in the bios before/while using the 6600GT add in card? If not, you could have all sorts of video hardware conflict troubles.

Paul

[Seve]

Hello:
Maybe a silly question, if so please disregard.
Do you have the external power connector plugged into your video card, if it has one?

Seve