[i965GME] missing characters in Google Earth with DRI enabled

[meijer.o]

Not all characters are displayed in Google Earth. See attachment
If I disable DRI in xorg.conf, then the problem is gone (Google Earth becomes very slow)
Compiz disabled.
Bug did not occur with Ubuntu 8.04
Bug occurs in Ubuntu 8.10 also with kernel 2.6.24 (ubuntu 8.04)
Bug occurs when upgrading from 8.04 as well in a fresh install of Ubuntu 8.10

Laptop Compaq 6720S

Snippet lspci

00:00.0 Host bridge: Intel Corporation Mobile GME965/GLE960 Memory Controller Hub (rev 0c)
 Subsystem: Hewlett-Packard Company Unknown device 30d8
 Control: I/O- Mem+ BusMaster+ SpecCycle- MemWINV- VGASnoop- ParErr- Stepping- SERR- FastB2B-
 Status: Cap+ 66MHz- UDF- FastB2B+ ParErr- DEVSEL=fast >TAbort- <TAbort- <MAbort+ >SERR- <PERR-
 Latency: 0
 Capabilities: [e0] Vendor Specific Information

00:02.0 VGA compatible controller: Intel Corporation Mobile GME965/GLE960 Integrated Graphics Controller (rev 0c) (prog-if 00 [VGA controller])
 Subsystem: Hewlett-Packard Company Unknown device 30d8
 Control: I/O+ Mem+ BusMaster+ SpecCycle- MemWINV- VGASnoop- ParErr- Stepping- SERR- FastB2B-
 Status: Cap+ 66MHz- UDF- FastB2B+ ParErr- DEVSEL=fast >TAbort- <TAbort- <MAbort- >SERR- <PERR-
 Latency: 0
 Interrupt: pin A routed to IRQ 16
 Region 0: Memory at e4400000 (64-bit, non-prefetchable) [size=1M]
 Region 2: Memory at d0000000 (64-bit, prefetchable) [size=256M]
 Region 4: I/O ports at 4000 [size=8]
 Capabilities: [90] Message Signalled Interrupts: Mask- 64bit- Queue=0/0 Enable-
  Address: 00000000 Data: 0000
 Capabilities: [d0] Power Management version 3
  Flags: PMEClk- DSI+ D1- D2- AuxCurrent=0mA PME(D0-,D1-,D2-,D3hot-,D3cold-)
  Status: D0 PME-Enable- DSel=0 DScale=0 PME-
  Bridge: PM- B3+

00:02.1 Display controller: Intel Corporation Mobile GME965/GLE960 Integrated Graphics Controller (rev 0c)
 Subsystem: Hewlett-Packard Company Unknown device 30d8
 Control: I/O+ Mem+ BusMaster+ SpecCycle- MemWINV- VGASnoop- ParErr- Stepping- SERR- FastB2B-
 Status: Cap+ 66MHz- UDF- FastB2B+ ParErr- DEVSEL=fast >TAbort- <TAbort- <MAbort- >SERR- <PERR-
 Latency: 0
 Region 0: Memory at e4500000 (64-bit, non-prefetchable) [size=1M]
 Capabilities: [d0] Power Management version 3
  Flags: PMEClk- DSI+ D1- D2- AuxCurrent=0mA PME(D0-,D1-,D2-,D3hot-,D3cold-)
  Status: D0 PME-Enable- DSel=0 DScale=0 PME-
  Bridge: PM- B3+

[Paul Bryan (pbryan)]

"Me too" on Lenovo ThinkPad X61 w. Ubuntu 8.10 64-bit.

[rso (reto-schoch)]

It's also true for me. While I run it on a HP Compaq dx6100 Mikrotower PC with 32-bit, I'm reasoning that this must be a generic issue. It might be a mis- or uncompleted configuration / installation as the result of updating from 8.04 to 8.10.

[Götz Christ (g-christ)]

I'm also affected by this bug with a fresh install of Kubuntu 8.10

Ubuntu 2.6.27-7.16-generic
xserver-xorg-video-intel 2:2.4.1-1ubuntu10
xserver-xorg-core
2:1.5.2-2ubuntu3

[Geir Ove Myhr (gomyhr)]

Uploaded Xorg.0.log from the description as a file. This makes it easier to get the overview

[TWO (two)]

Kubuntu 8.10 KDE 4.1.3, direct upgrade from Hardy on Dell Inspiron 1300 and Intel Corporation Mobile 915GM/GMS/910GML Express Graphics Controller and all latest updates applied.

With desktop effects enabled there is no chance for the globe to be rendered and the program barely displays properly at all.

With desktop effects disabled, the globe renders correctly however there are still missing fonts here and there.

This is with Google Earth: 4.2.0205.5730.

Enabling safe mode or 16 bit texture colours in the program only makes things worse!

[Götz Christ (g-christ)]

I have forgot to say the graphics card: It's a 865G

00:02.0 VGA compatible controller: Intel Corporation 82865G Integrated GraphicsController (rev 02)

[abarrow (andy-sailor)]

Same on Dell Inspiron 1525, Intel Corporation Mobile GM965/GL960 Integrated Graphics Controller (rev 0c).

Lost characters and corrupted display of earth image, even with atmosphere turned off, 16 bit color, safe mode, etc.

Ubuntu 8.10, upgrade from Hardy and all additional updates applied.

Google Earth 4.3.7284.3916 (beta)
Renderer OpenGL
Operating System Linux (2.6.27.0)
Video Driver Tungsten Graphics, Inc
Max Texture Size 2048x2048
Server kh.google.com

[abarrow (andy-sailor)]

Supplement to previous report. Replaced libgl1-mesa-glx with libgl1-mesa-swx11. Google Earth works perfectly but slow.

[ImChipBrown (chip-westcoastbrowns)]

This will be next to useless info, but I had GoogleEarth working perfectly with my Dell Latitude D610 (i915GM video) under Ubuntu 8.04. I updated to Ubuntu 8.10, and it broke GoogleEarth (same disappearing font issue). Street names are OK, but status info, city names are screwed. Also, I use the Lattice Screensaver. If it kicks in, then I kick back out, GoogleEarth has large, random squares of black where satellite images used to be. They will appear and disappear as you zoom in and out. The compass become unusable. I can't describe it other than to think that layers of graphics are somehow being corrupted?

I've also seen strange things happening in lBreakout2. Random pauses (did this under Ubuntu 8.04 as well), but also the "Status bricks" on the right side of the screen become "pinstriped".

Synaptic Update manager has some new Intel Video updates yesterday, along with 20-30 other changes. I updated everything without reading the descriptions, hoping that all would be cured. No dice.

[Trip Ericson (rovfan)]

I'm also having this issue, as a part of on-going issues with Google Earth. See my posts including and after 2008-09-04.

https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/googleearth-package/+bug/165117

[Götz Christ (g-christ)]

I have found that in Stellarium 0.10.0-0ubuntu2 from this PPA https://launchpad.net/~ethana2/+archive I have the same problem with fonts:

https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/stellarium/+bug/298519

So it seems to be more OpenGl/Mesa problem related and not from googleearth or Stellarium direct.

[Trip Ericson (rovfan)]

The latest Jaunty updates which just came down fixed this issue for me. Well, not to jinx it, but so far so good!

[ImChipBrown (chip-westcoastbrowns)]

My Dell Latitude 610 was as close to perfect as I could get it under Ubuntu 8.04. The upgrade to 8.10 broke the graphics (most of the cool screensavers, GoogleEarth, LBreakout2). It screwed up VirtualBox: cursor freezes when I start a Virtual Windows XP session and remains onscreen, VitualBox's cursor takes over and is OK, on exit "real cursor" still frozen. It's a USB attached mouse, so I can unplug and replug it and it lives again.

Luckily, I have a Linux and XP partition. I can boot into Windows XP and run GoogleEarth in all it's magnificence, so I know my hardware is just fine.

It's the (expletive deleted) change in something - what, I don't know - that made Ubuntu 8.10 a huge step backwards. I'm totally frustrated.

I've tried all suggestions. I've tried the xserver-configure thing and it starts by asking about Frame buffers. IT NEVER ASKS which driver I would prefer.

Other->OpenGL does nothing.
Other->Screens and Graphics asks for a password. Then does nothing.

I've got a ton of xorg.conf.you-name-it files. I've screwed around in /boot/config-2.6.27-10-generic.

I've "lived" in Ubuntu for about a year. I love much about it; enough to make a few sacrifices. But that damn "other" partition is starting to whisper "Come back to the dark side".

From the threads I've read, this is a very old and unresolved problem with embedded Intel graphics chips. I'm thinking there are a ton of Dell laptop owners that have never seen how great their hardware can actually run. And a few of us that actually got it running somehow for a blessed while, and have been brought crashing back to earth.

I need a new idea to keep me going. Nothing I've found works.

[abarrow (andy-sailor)]

I can confirm that upgrading to Jaunty seems to have fixed the problem.

[ImChipBrown (chip-westcoastbrowns)]

OK. Downloaded Ubuntu 9.04 Jaunty Jackalope Alpha 1 iso for i386. I've booted from it but don't have the intestinal fortitude to tell it to "Install". Is this what is suggested?

[Götz Christ (g-christ)]

In openSUSE 11.1 I don't have this problem with GE 4.3.
So this is sure a bug in intel driver maybe in ubuntus package or upstream.

[abarrow (andy-sailor)]

It's not necessary to upgrade from an iso. You can just change the
references in /etc/apt/sources.list from hardy to jaunty, do apt-get
update, then apt-get dist-upgrade. Aside from my Dell hanging up for a
couple of minutes when kernel nfs drivers are loaded (I subsequently
disabled them), Jaunty seems to work fine for me.

-----Original Message-----
From: ImChipBrown <email address hidden>
Reply-to: Bug 295934 <email address hidden>
To: <email address hidden>
Subject: [Bug 295934] Re: [GME965] missing characters in Google Earth
with DRI enabled
Date: Sat, 13 Dec 2008 00:30:57 -0000

OK. Downloaded Ubuntu 9.04 Jaunty Jackalope Alpha 1 iso for i386. I've
booted from it but don't have the intestinal fortitude to tell it to
"Install". Is this what is suggested?

--
Andy
(<email address hidden>)

[ImChipBrown (chip-westcoastbrowns)]

I did the Jaunty upgrade. GoogleEarth worked OK, but still slow. Lattice Screensaver - there is about a two second delay between, lets say, donuts, refreshing their new positions. Like the old flip-books, except you are not flipping fast enough. Metacity broke.

I got a notice of 122 or so updates this morning and downloaded them all. Now, I get the GoogleEarth splash screen, the globe spins up a little, then the program quits (disappears).

Maybe I've just screwed this up too badly. I've bounced back and forth between mesa-glx and mesa-swx11. I've dug up old xorg.conf files and started with fresh reconfigurations. I've screwed with DRM, FB, INTEL and i810, i915 settings in config-2.6.28-2-generic.

Like I've said, maybe I've just dug myself too deep a hole.

[abarrow (andy-sailor)]

Do another update/upgrade today. Some of the Xorg packages were broke
yesterday, and seem to be fixed today.

-----Original Message-----
From: ImChipBrown <email address hidden>
Reply-to: Bug 295934 <email address hidden>
To: <email address hidden>
Subject: [Bug 295934] Re: [i965GME] missing characters in Google Earth
with DRI enabled
Date: Wed, 17 Dec 2008 19:16:04 -0000

I did the Jaunty upgrade. GoogleEarth worked OK, but still slow.
Lattice Screensaver - there is about a two second delay between, lets
say, donuts, refreshing their new positions. Like the old flip-books,
except you are not flipping fast enough. Metacity broke.

I got a notice of 122 or so updates this morning and downloaded them
all. Now, I get the GoogleEarth splash screen, the globe spins up a
little, then the program quits (disappears).

Maybe I've just screwed this up too badly. I've bounced back and forth
between mesa-glx and mesa-swx11. I've dug up old xorg.conf files and
started with fresh reconfigurations. I've screwed with DRM, FB, INTEL
and i810, i915 settings in config-2.6.28-2-generic.

Like I've said, maybe I've just dug myself too deep a hole.

--
Andy
(<email address hidden>)

[ImChipBrown (chip-westcoastbrowns)]

There were a lot more updates (44?), but I've only managed to get GoogleEarth to show the splash screen, then disappear. At least I don't have to see the globe attempt to spin-up ;-}

I think I have an interesting (to whom, I don't know) Xorg.0.log. Seems i915_dri.so can't be found or whatever. Seems to be fairly critical.

I want to thank abarrow for the help. He/she has so far talked me down from the ledge of wiping the disk and starting over (or not?).

[abarrow (andy-sailor)]

This is an older bug:
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/mesa/+bug/35741
but seems to indicate that nvidia drivers interfere with mesa. One of
the posters corrected the problem by removing xorg-driver-fglrx and
fglrx-control. These packages are not installed on my Dell, and I have
GE working fine.

You might give it a shot.

YMMV!

-----Original Message-----
From: ImChipBrown <email address hidden>
Reply-to: Bug 295934 <email address hidden>
To: <email address hidden>
Subject: [Bug 295934] Re: [i965GME] missing characters in Google Earth
with DRI enabled
Date: Thu, 18 Dec 2008 05:59:18 -0000

i915_dri.so
--
Andy
(<email address hidden>)

[ImChipBrown (chip-westcoastbrowns)]

Crap. I got this thing to work and I don't know how (exactly).

I followed the thread and at the very bottom I found:

aptitude remove xorg-driver-fglrx fglrx-control

I did that, rebooted, and no luck. But, in the Xorg.0.log I noticed i915.dri.so failed (no file?)
Did a search of my machine and found it in /dripkg/XOrg/i915

I had to make a /usr/lib/dri directory, then copy i915.dri.so into it

That got me further, with a complaint (in Xorg.0.log) about an undefined pointer.

I started thinking about mesa, and went to Synaptic, found that libgl1-mesa-dri was not (no longer?) selected, so I loaded it.

Rebooted and GoogleEarth started spinning the globe and disappeared. Checked out a Screensaver or two (Flying Toasters, Gears, Lattice) and they seemed to be better.

Tried clicking GoogleEarth once more, and up it comes in all it's glory!

So, you see, I really fumbled around and have no "recipe", but something in this rant worked.

Thanks to abarrow. Except, why did he publicly note: Y(ou)M(ake)M(e)V(omit) ?

[g1annis (g1annis)]

I'm sorry. I missed something.

In status column it says "Fix Released" but i cannot see the fix. What is the fix? How can i make my Google Earth run normally?

Thank you.

[Sergei (Nolar) Vasilyev (nolar)]

I have 8.10+proposed. Have put "jaunty" repositories into sources.list instead of "intrepid" ones, updated, and then upgraded xserver-xorg-video-intel with all its dependencies (xserver's core and all drivers). But this didn't solved the problem, and the bug still exists as before.

But after loading Jaunty Live CD seems that bug disappears. So I beleive there is a cure, but I did something wrong and failed to get it. Could anyone tell what exact packages have to be upgraded to Jaunty to fix the bug?

[ImChipBrown (chip-westcoastbrowns)]

Apologies, all.

On 12-18-08 I reported a success in getting GoogleEarth back to normal. It was true until the next reboot. Other complaints about Lattice screensavers and LBreakout2 (these also really test your graphics) resurfaced.

I backed up everything that would back-up with Grsync, then wiped out 9.04 (or whatever Frankenstein I had going) and reinstalled good old 8.04. This was on or about 12-22-08.

I'm still tweeking to get back to normal, but have gotten rid of lots of garbage. My system informs me that 8.10 update is available. I say, "Thanks, but no".

It was a desperate move, so I didn't report it in this thread. Happy to report GoogleEarth and the others are back to full speed.

[Stephan Ebert (ebertstephan)]

I had Google Earth 4.3 working well, albeit slowly on a virtual machine with 9.04 alpha 3 installed, but the slowness is probably just a consequence of the virtual machine. When I installed GE 5.0 it stopped working entirely. It now only shows the splash screen and then exits with the following message:

Warning: Unable to create prefs directory '/home/username/.googleearth'. File exists.
./googleearth-bin: relocation error: /usr/lib/i686/cmov/libssl.so.0.9.8: symbol BIO_test_flags, version OPENSSL_0.9.8 not defined in file libcrypto.so.0.9.8 with link time reference

[Matthias Blaicher (blaicher)]

@Stephan Ebert: You need to delete libcrypto.so.0.9.8 in the installation directory - no idea why it ships its own version

[Götz Christ (g-christ)]

I have tested Kubuntu Jaunty amd64 Desktop from 03-feb-2009 and this bug wasn't present any more. Tested with Stellarium. But I get some horizontal screen corruptions.

So this bug seems to be fixed in Jaunty with Intel 2.6.1

[El Viejo Lobo (yigal-lupo)]

I installed Jaunty and since that I can not get Gooleearth to move more then a sluggish slow move.
I have - "Intel Corporation Mobile 945GM/PM/GMS, 943/940GML and 945GT Express Memory Controller Hub (rev 03)" on my HP Pavilion. I never had a problem with GE on this machine with Ubuntu since 7.04

[Daniel Eckl (daniel-eckl)]

Sorry, El Viejo, but this bug is about missing characters. So beside low framerate, which is completely unrelated to this subject, do you get missing characters, or is this fixed for you?

[effell (effell)]

I'm still running Ubuntu 7.10. I fixed the font problem with version 5 of Earth by going into synaptic and installing every package that could possibly be related to fonts.

It's working for me now, so I won't look into into any more, but hope this helps someone in tracking down the precise problem.

[Alex Valavanis (valavanisalex)]

Intrepid Ibex reached end-of-life on 30 April 2010 so I am closing the
report. The bug has been fixed in newer releases of Ubuntu.

[Rolf Leggewie (r0lf)]

Hardy has seen the end of its life and is no longer receiving any updates. Marking the Hardy task for this ticket as "Won't Fix".