font corruption and desktop trashed.

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luxy
Posts: 39
Joined: Mon Oct 16, 2017 8:04 am

font corruption and desktop trashed.

Post by luxy »

Last year I had this issue and it seemed to disappear at some point without any obvious reason. Not being one to look a gift horse in the mouth, I just got on with life.

Now it's come back with a vengeance.

Some programs like libreoffice and Opera (aka Chrome) trigger this bug and trash my LX suite fonts ( XFE, LXterminal etc. ) and make a total mess of my desktop.

It seems to be kernel related.

I'm running Fedora31 on this machine and it currently supplies 5.8.10 vintage kernel.

Until recently I was running 5.3.12 and this does not seem to be affected.

I have looked in dmesg and journalctl and don't see anything obvious.

Can anyone help of finding out what is going on here. It is nigh on unusable unless I boot to the old kernel. That will be a problem at some stage.

Thanks.
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drooly
Posts: 791
Joined: Mon Apr 08, 2013 6:45 am

Re: font corruption and desktop trashed.

Post by drooly »

luxy wrote: Mon Sep 21, 2020 6:52 pmSome programs like libreoffice and Opera (...) trash my LX suite fonts (...) and make a total mess of my desktop. It seems to be kernel related. (...) I have looked in dmesg and journalctl and don't see anything obvious.
Why do you think it's kernel related?
What application is that screenshot from?
Does the whole desktop look like that after you (try to) start LO or Opera? Always? Is this reproducible? How?
luxy
Posts: 39
Joined: Mon Oct 16, 2017 8:04 am

Re: font corruption and desktop trashed.

Post by luxy »

Hi drooly,

As I detailed above it happens with recent kernels and not with the earlier ones. When changing that one variable I can turn the bug on / off. That seems to me like a clear indication it's kernel related. Let me know if you find another logic.

The window in the middle of the screenshot is XFE file manager. This was previously running correctly and got corrupted while doing nothing ( except redrawing it's main window when it got the focus ). LXterminal gets similar treatment. The desktop content is getting totally trashed as you can see.

All window title bars get the text of the title similarly garbled so it looks like openbox is affected.

Previously, the content of programs like Firefox and L.O. have been preserved but in this latest outbreak L.O. Calc had its spreadsheet content garbled ( text illegible ) and menus also illegible. I just about managed to guess where to click to shut it down.

Somehow openbox or LXDE seems to be having issues with recent kernels.

For the moment I boot to 5.3.12-300.fc31.x86_64 and have not had a glitch since I posted the issue here, which is about 12 days now.

Thanks for taking a look.
edward
Posts: 146
Joined: Mon Sep 22, 2008 11:01 pm
Location: Boston

Re: font corruption and desktop trashed.

Post by edward »

That definitely looks like video corruption. I had that on my other desktop - if it didn't crash completely, if I tried to use Cinnamon, Plasma (KDE), MATE, or XFCE. Unfortunately, there is no safe way to remove most installed desktops without DNF wanting to remove hundreds of other packages and dependencies, although I was successful removing Cinnamon from both of my desktops.

LXDE and LXQT run perfectly. :)

On that system, which has an on-board NVIDIA GPU, it allocates only 128Mb of RAM for it, out of the total 3Gb of RAM installed. When I first started with Fedora (21), I had to disable GLX because it was causing Firefox, Thunderbird and SeaMonkey to crash. Once GLX was disabled, those particular crashes ceased. All other applications I used, were fine. It is using the 'nouveau' driver and kernel module.

The current Fedora kernel is 5.8.12 and it is available for Fedora 31. Note that once Fedora 33 is released, which may be later in October, support for Fedora 31 will end four weeks after the release of Fedora 33.
Debian Sid - LXDE
luxy
Posts: 39
Joined: Mon Oct 16, 2017 8:04 am

Re: font corruption and desktop trashed.

Post by luxy »

Thanks for that info. Since I will soon need to move to F32, it looks like I need to resolve this fairly soon.

When I said kernel related, that could be explained by kernel modules. I also have an onboard NVidia and I have to use nouveau since the proprietory drivers don't support this older GPU any more. ( Wasted days on that one before ) .

How do I disable GLX ? That's worth trying.

Can that be done by editing the boot command?
edward
Posts: 146
Joined: Mon Sep 22, 2008 11:01 pm
Location: Boston

Re: font corruption and desktop trashed.

Post by edward »

I have an older NVIDIA chip in this, the GeForce 6150SE / nForce 430. The drivers for this chip that had been provided by the RPM Fusion repository, were EOL'd beginning with Fedora 28.

It's very easy to disable GLX.

In /etc/X11/xorg.conf.d/ add a file named 01-my-disable-glx.conf and put the following in it:

Code: Select all

Section "Module"
        Disable  "glx"
EndSection
then reboot.

If there already is a file in that directory beginning with 01-, then save it as 02-my-disable-glx.conf. My directory already had a file beginning with 00-, so I began the filename with 01-.

Although this worked on my system to resolve the Mozilla software crashes, disabling GLX may or may not work on other systems in resolving different issues. To re-enable GLX, simply delete that file you added, then reboot.
Debian Sid - LXDE
luxy
Posts: 39
Joined: Mon Oct 16, 2017 8:04 am

Re: font corruption and desktop trashed.

Post by luxy »

many thanks. I'll give that a try. It should a least tell me whether this is nouveau/kernel issue.
drooly
Posts: 791
Joined: Mon Apr 08, 2013 6:45 am

Re: font corruption and desktop trashed.

Post by drooly »

luxy wrote: Sat Oct 03, 2020 8:44 amWhen I said kernel related, that could be explained by kernel modules. I also have an onboard NVidia and I have to use nouveau since the proprietory drivers don't support this older GPU any more. ( Wasted days on that one before ).
In my experience nouveau (sometimes) does not work so well with older Nvidia GPUs.
Try what edward suggested, elsewise post

Code: Select all

lspci -k
I must say, Fedora strikes me as the wrong distro for matured hardware.
edward
Posts: 146
Joined: Mon Sep 22, 2008 11:01 pm
Location: Boston

Re: font corruption and desktop trashed.

Post by edward »

drooly wrote: Sat Oct 03, 2020 2:36 pm
luxy wrote: Sat Oct 03, 2020 8:44 amWhen I said kernel related, that could be explained by kernel modules. I also have an onboard NVidia and I have to use nouveau since the proprietory drivers don't support this older GPU any more. ( Wasted days on that one before ).
In my experience nouveau (sometimes) does not work so well with older Nvidia GPUs.
Try what edward suggested, elsewise post

Code: Select all

lspci -k
I must say, Fedora strikes me as the wrong distro for matured hardware.
I've used six different distros over the years, Fedora being the current. The NVIDIA system was purchased in 2009.

I recently disabled GLX on my other desktop (purchased in 2011, with an on-board AMD Radeon 3000 (RS780L)), to see if it resolved a crash involving a different e-mail app. A library in the glib2 package was seg faulting the e-mail app if I changed the theme while the e-mail app was running at the same time. Since the lack of GLX didn't resolve that, I re-enabled it.

During my testing, I discovered there was a second method to change the theme (using LXAppearance (Customize Look and Feel on the LXDE Preferences menu in Fedora)) and it was in using this, that the library in glib2 seg faulted the e-mail app. If I changed the theme using Openbox Configuration Manager, which I believe is the 'official' method to change a theme, the e-mail app didn't crash. The e-mail app also crashed while changing the theme using two other desktops, as well as changing it via LXAppearance in LXQt.
Debian Sid - LXDE
luxy
Posts: 39
Joined: Mon Oct 16, 2017 8:04 am

Re: font corruption and desktop trashed.

Post by luxy »

Many thanks Edward.

I tried setting the theme via the menu on the desktop rather than via the Fedora menu and it is now working without screwing everything up.

I changed from Clearview to Clearview3.4 and all seems OK.

I have not tried going back by the same method, so I have not determined whether is the old theme which has a bug or the method of changing the theme as you suggested.

I also tried disable GLX as someone else suggested but this did not help. I'm replying here with the current fix in case anyone else gets hit with this.

Once I've investigated a bit deeper and tried the newer kernels again, I'll post back with more comprehensive results.

Thanks for giving the way out, this was becoming quite a problem.
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