Gnome-panel turns invisible

[Chris]

Binary package hint: gnome-panel

The panel becomes invisible at random intervals. In this condition it's as if the panel were completely transparent: it remains fully functional, tooltips and applets work fine, etc. Doing 'killall gnome-panel' causes it to restart normally (it becomes visible). One can also recover by right-clicking, selecting Properties, and switching the background from "Solid color" to "None (use system theme)" and back again.

This is on Intrepid amd64 current as of 26apr09. I'm running Metacity with the compositing management feature enabled. The panel background is set to a solid color with opacity about 75%.

I'm not sure whether this is significant, but the problem seems to crop up after restoring the machine from suspend-to-ram.

[Sebastien Bacher (seb128)]

Thank you for taking the time to report this bug and helping to make Ubuntu better. Please answer these questions:

 * Is this reproducible?
 * If so, what specific steps should we take to recreate this bug?
 * Do you get the issue when not enabled composite?

 This will help us to find and resolve the problem.

[Dries Harnie (dharnie)]

A friend of mine has had this same issue in intrepid, has upgraded to jaunty but the issue remains.
He remarks it can also be fixed simply by starting "xine". No need to play a file, just start it.

It does appear to be random, though.

[Dries Harnie (dharnie)]

We talked some more and he found steps to reproduce it!

1) start xine
2) turn off the window borders (hit 'b')
3) quit xine
4) borders should disappear

starting xine with the -B flag also triggers it.

Starting xine without the B flag or quitting xine with borders enabled brings the panel instantly back.

This doesn't explain the random events, but can at least help isolate the buggy program.

[Chris (bridgeriver)]

Sorry for the slow reply.

I have switched from the ATI fglrx video driver to the open-source driver. This has cured one of the most important issues with my system: Suspend/Resume (S3) no is longer extremely slow and disk intensive. It now takes just 5 seconds or so, and the system is very responsive after a resume, presumably because the memory allocation isn't messed up (half the RAM unused, with almost nothing allocated as cache, and lots of data in the swap space) as it is with the proprietary driver.

Perhaps as a side effect, the invisible Gnome panel problem I reported here is gone too. I have used the machine extensively for weeks since the video driver switch, and have not seen it, whereas it used to happen unpredictably every couple of days.

Note that my issue had nothing to do with xine or with window borders; it was just a Gnome-Panel thing.

Chris

[Chris (bridgeriver)]

It's back.

I hadn't seen the problem in weeks since I moved from the ATI fglrx video driver to the open-source driver and turned the translucency off for the gnome-panel, so I thought one of those changes had cured it. Nope.

The panel disappeared again yesterday. I was able to get it back by right-clicking it (I couldn't see it but it was there and working, and the tooltips were visible), getting the Properties, and switching the background from Solid Color to System Theme.

Weird little problem.

[Chris (bridgeriver)]

Sebastian: I will disable compositing in metacity and see whether the problem recurs. But it happens so infrequently that it will probably take a while to be sure whether it's gone.

[Victor Vargas (kamus)]

Since this report have a long time without activity, please could you check (if is possible) in latest version included in Karmic if this issue is still happening? Thanks in advance.

[Chris (bridgeriver)]

I have not seen this issue in Karmic, or in Jaunty recently.

As far as I can tell, it's been fixed.

[Sebastien Bacher (seb128)]

Closing the bug since that works correctly now

[codexp (codexp)]

Hey, that bug still persists!

Just downloaded latest ubuntu, installed and updated.
When I started Xiphos, it went into fullscreen mode and caused the panels to disappear.
I closed Xiphos, but panels were still invisible. I noticed the panel on the left was flickering at times when I moved the mouse cursor over it, but remained invisible at last.

Linux version 3.0.0-16-generic (buildd@zirconium) (gcc version 4.6.1 (Ubuntu/Linaro 4.6.1-9ubuntu3) ) #29-Ubuntu SMP Tue Feb 14 12:49:42 UTC 2012