Black areas appear on the screen randomly

[Pasi Lallinaho]

When using the computer normally (eg. browsing the internet with Firefox), black areas of different sizes appear on my screen. They don't go away until that exact part of monitor/screen has to be/is refreshed.

As an attachment I include a photograph of a relatively small area that appeared to my screen during browsing the Xubuntu website. This *isn't* a Firefox rendering problem for sure, because this happens also in, for example, gedit.

[Bryce Harrington (bryce)]

Hi knome,

Thanks for including an image to demonstrate the issue. Could you also please attach the output of `lspci -vvnn`, and attach your /var/log/Xorg.0.log or Xorg.0.log.old file from after reproducing this issue. If you've made any customizations to your /etc/X11/xorg.conf please attach that as well.

[This is an automated message. Apologies if it has reached you inappropriately; please just reply to this message indicating so.]

[Simon Morgan (sjmorgan)]

I also have this problem. I used to have the same symptoms with the open source nvidia driver (nv), but now I also get it with the proprietary official one as well.

[emil0r (emil0r)]

Same problem. Here's my files.

[Santi (santiycr)]

I'm having the same problem.
It failed using both: nv and the propietary driver.

[Santi (santiycr)]

I get them pretty often (it's easy reproduce, by scrolling the page a little).
 Here's a screenshot if this exact page full of black areas.

Note: Sometimes the areas are transparent instead of black (most of that happen when I'm working in the gnome-terminal).

[Angel (angel-arancibia)]

Same as Santi, but I'm using the intel driver

Here are my lspci and xorg output with some screenshot.

Thanks for your time.

[HighInBC (highinbc)]

Confirmed to be happening to me as well. Running Ubuntu 9.04 AMD64 Desktop. Using nVidia Corporation G71 [GeForce 7300 GS] with the 'NVIDIA accelerated graphics drive (version180)'.

Problem did not start until after upgrading from Intrepid to Jaunty. It also happens on another system with the same card/architecture that was a fresh install of jaunty.

[Santi (santiycr)]

Sorry, I forgot to say I'm on a AMD64, using a GeForce 7300LE.

[Bryce Harrington (bryce)]

I've posted a new version of the -nvidia driver to our xorg-edgers PPA,
would you mind testing it either on Jaunty or Karmic and see if it
resolves this bug?

Get nvidia-graphics-drivers-180 - 185.18.14 here:

  https://edge.launchpad.net/~xorg-edgers/+archive/ppa

[Pasi Lallinaho (knome)]

Still exists with 185.18.14 from the PPA.

[Pasi Lallinaho (knome)]

With the new driver, I've started to get more of something similar – different colored dots. Before this driver version there wasn't a lot of them (a few in the boot loading stage), but now there's almost 20 (?!) of them boot time and they even appear in the desktop sometimes.

A clipped screenshot is attached (x-bug-green-dot.png – "Green dot"). If you think this is a completely different bug, I'm happy to report a new bug, but from my point of view these two things are really closely attached and they always appear together.

[Pasi Lallinaho (knome)]

Even more details – the green dot(s) (two similar) only appear on one of my two monitors. It's the non-primary display for X screen.

[Pasi Lallinaho (knome)]

Actually, those dots might be produced by the soon-end-of-its-life hardware. More information will follow if it seems it's by the driver. Sorry for any inconvenience I might have caused.

[Pasi Lallinaho (knome)]

The green dots mentioned earlier are unrelated. Also, I haven't seen this bug in a while now, so it's probably fixed now in Karmic.

[Marius B. Kotsbak (mariusko)]

After upgrading from the Natty version to 275.19 from Nvidia (install script), I haven't seen this anymore, so I guess it is solved upstream.

[Marius B. Kotsbak (mariusko)]

Nope, I saw it again. There is a newer driver available, but the link on Nvidias website for 64 bit was broken.

[Bryce Harrington (bryce)]

Hey knome,

You filed this bug report against natty, but I see it's still open and
doesn't appear to have much activity recently. So, now that oneiric
is released and stable, this may be a good point for you to upgrade
and re-test if this issue is still present there.

If it's solved in the new release and you think it's worth backporting
the fix, please indicate that. Or if having the fix in the new release
is good enough, feel free to close out the bug (or let us know and we'll
close it.)

If it's not solved, leave the bug report open. I can't promise we'll
get to it (we get way more bugs filed than we can usually get to), but
your testing and feedback can help out if and when we do.

[Marius B. Kotsbak (mariusko)]

Bug still present in Oneiric.

[Pasi Lallinaho (knome)]

I haven't got this bug anymore in Oneiric, but I've recently changed the graphics card too (the other one got broken, but the black areas didn't have anything to do with that), so I can't really tell if it would be present with my earlier card.

[dino99 (9d9)]

That version is no more supported; please open a new bug report if the actual archive found version also has the same issue.