Since the 14th of April, when I upgrade Xorg to version 2:1.7.5-1 (coming from
2:1.6.5-1) my X display has start working really weird. When browsing the web
or when working with a terminal many different artifacts will appear in the
fonts making the web pages unreadable.
The system is barely useful for this task as the artifacts come and go, at
random. The artifacts show up constantly and go away (or reappear) when the
scrollbar is used in a web page or when it is refreshed. It seems to happen
more with "intensive" web applications such as Google+.
I'm attaching two screenshots of this bug as seen in GNOME's browser. Once
with slashdot.org (in which a few artifacts are seen) and another with
news.google.es (much more artifacts).
This happens mostly with web browsers (frequently to the point of being
unbearable) and with the gnome-desktop (infrequently), I have not seen this
behaviour when running Wine applications (such as Picasa) or when running
other programs (such as LibreOffice).
I initially thought that this might be associated:
- with the kernel I was running at the time, but I upgrade to
(linux-image-3.2.0-2-686-pae, version 3.2.15-1) but it did not solve the
issue.
- to the GNOME3 desktop environment, since it was also upgrade in that
time frame. But after installing and testing others I can conclude that
it does not seem related to the Desktop Manager as it happens
independently of it, I can reproduce it with GNOME 3 and with Xfce.
The problem does not reproduce when using a remote display so it might be
associated with the ATI driver. For reference, in April's upgrade I also
upgraded from xserver-xorg-video-ati version 1:6.12.3-1 to 1:6.12.5-1. I'm
attaching the lspci output (of lspci -tv) in case it is useful to diagnose the
problem. Now I'm running 1:6.14.4-2 but it doesn't seem to fix the issue
either.
Since upgrading to different versions of Xorg and the driver has not yet
fixed this issue I'm filing this bug.
Feel free to ask for more information, to reassign this bug to the most
appropiate package or to merge it with others (I've not seen anyone in the BTS
that looks exactly like this, that's why I opened a new bug)
Thanks for your help in fixing this issue,
Javier