Jerome Yuzyk posted on Fri, 12 Nov 2010 11:50:26 -0700 as excerpted:
> Ever since I installed KDE 4 I've had corrupted icons on the Task
> Manager panel and the hour/minute hands on the analog clock. I'm now at
> 4.5.2 and still I reliably see the arms on the clock and icons on the TM
> panel look like they're dithered or fractured. I don't see this in other
> places throughout the UI so I'm wondering if this is an ongoing plasma
> issue. I've turned off all the plasma eye-candy settings, and still get
> mashed-up icons from apps like Kopete, KAlarm, KMail, and every analog
> clock I've tried.
>
> Any ideas what I should look for? There are so many display-related
> settings scattered all over that I have no idea whether it's the theme I
> use, the icon set, video driver, or whatever. I have an nVidia 8400 card
> feeding a Samsung flatpanel at 1920x1200 and use the nouveau driver, in
> Fedora 13.
The analog clock issue is OpenGL (or at least display driver, but likely
OpenGL accel) related, as I have a somewhat different manifestation of the
issue here -- it works most of the time, but occasionally, most often at
kde (well, plasma-desktop) start, the entire clock will disappear, save
perhaps for the tip of the minute hand. Here, a quick context-click where
the clock /should/ be, choosing clock settings, and toggling either show
seconds hand or show timezone, then hitting OK, thus forcing a clock
redraw, clears up the problem and I don't seem to get it again unless I
kill and restart plasma-desktop (which I do occasionally as it's easier to
do that to toggle the always-visible/autohide on the panel I normally keep
on top, when I want to use all available display space). Of course, after
toggling the clock option to force the redraw, I immediately toggle it
again, to my preferred setting (both second-hand and tz display off), but
it's the forced repaint of the initial toggle that clears up the issue for
me.
I'm running the xorg/kernel/mesa native Radeon drivers, and the problem
was worse with them at one point, the reason (besides that a repaint fixes
it) I know that it's OpenGL related.
I don't run a task manager plasmoid (alt-tab and desktop-grid task
switching are my preferred choices, and I'd rather save the space that
plasmoid would take for something else) so I've no direct experience with
it, but I'd /strongly/ suspect it's related to the same root OpenGL
related bug.
You might however wish to play with some of the taskbar and thumbnail
options, to see if it helps or makes a difference. In particular, in
kcontrol (wrongly aka systemsettings, wrongly, because it's mostly user-
specific and kde specific settings, at least as shipped by kde, so the
kde3 name kcontrol is FAR more accurate... and more googlable!), workspace
appearance and behavior, desktop effects, on the all effects tab, the
taskbar thumbnails option looks useful. And in the same place but on the
advanced tab, play with different settings for keep window thumbnails,
opengl mode, filtering, direct rendering, and vsync. (Note that the
direct rendering checkbox won't have any effect if kde has the
LIBGL_ALWAYS_INDIRECT variable set when it starts, and old way of
controlling direct rendering. It can also be set in xorg.conf, I believe.)
FWIW to see settings from a system running the radeon drivers, my options
on the advanced tab are OpenGL compositing, keep window thumbnails only
for shown windows (tho I've run it set to "always" and never figured out
exactly what the breakage warning is all about, I didn't notice it),
functionality checks enabled (disable unchecked), Texture from Pixmap,
Trilinear (reduce this if things are too slow, don't know how it might
affect your display bug tho), direct rendering enabled, vsync disabled
(doesn't seem to matter, here, the option's apparently enabled somewhere
else I don't know about, maybe default for the Radeon driver in kms mode),
and the xrender smoothscaling option unchecked but it doesn't matter since
I'm using OpenGL (and xrender's slow enough when I switch to it, I don't
want it slower, for sure!).
--
Duncan - List replies preferred. No HTML msgs.
"Every nonfree program has a lord, a master --
and if you use the program, he is your master." Richard Stallman
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