KDE3 icons flickering

[Michael Marley]

Binary package hint: libqt3-mt

There is a bug in QT3 which causes icons drawn in Konqueror, Dolphin, or another similar program to flicker on mouseover. This "bug" is the fact that QT3 does not use double-buffering for the icon redraw. There is a patch at http://robotics.dei.unipd.it/~koral/KDE/kflicker.html. This patch has been debianized and compiled by pelle.k on the Ubuntu forums. It completely eliminates flickering, and does not cause any negative side effects (crashing, slowness, etc.) I would like to request that the patch be compiled into the official Ubuntu libqt3-mt package.

[Michael Marley (mamarley)]

Here is the dpatch file for the patch.

[Michael Marley (mamarley)]

Here is a fixed .deb for 32 bit Gutsy.

[Michael Marley (mamarley)]

Here is a fixed .deb for 32 bit Hardy.

[Scott Kitterman (kitterman)]

At least as I understand your description, I don't seem to be having this problem on Hardy. Would you please give an exact procedure for replicating your problem. It's hard for me to tell if this is a fix worth uploading if I can't recreate the problem it's trying to fix.

[Michael Marley (mamarley)]

In order to replicate the problem, you must be using a video driver which is not "vesa." For some reason, the flickering does not happen with vesa. I have tested and seen it to be happening on all KDE-based distributions that use KDE3 and the ati, fglrx, nv, nvidia, and intel drivers. I have not tested other machines, but I assume it happens there too. To make the flickering much more obvious, you can bring up a Dolphin window (try the folder "/usr/bin" and ten resize it to be very small on the horizontal axis. (This way, some of the descriptions and paths for the icons exceed the area for the description at the bottom.) Then, mouse over the icons in the window. As the description bar is constantly redrawn larger to fit the descriptions, you will see all of the icons in the window flickering, not just the one your mouse goes over. Also, instead of looking at the actual icon, look at the text below the icon. It seems to be more obvious when flickering.

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

This bug was fixed in the package qt-x11-free - 3:3.3.8-b-0ubuntu2

---------------
qt-x11-free (3:3.3.8-b-0ubuntu2) hardy; urgency=low

  * Add debian/patches/kubuntu_09_flickerfree_qiconview.dpatch to add
    double-buffering for the icon redraw - prevents flicker on window
    redrawing (LP: #209227)

 -- Scott Kitterman <email address hidden> Tue, 08 Apr 2008 09:24:36 -0400