Extra debug

[Jeremy]

Highlighting of letters/numbers, gradually increasing to point of unreadable. After reboot, all ok for a while.

ProblemType: Bug
Architecture: i386
Dependencies:

DistroRelease: Ubuntu 9.04
Package: gnome None [modified: /var/lib/dpkg/info/gnome.list]
PackageArchitecture: all
ProcEnviron:
 LANG=en_GB.UTF-8
 SHELL=/bin/bash
SourcePackage: meta-gnome2
Uname: Linux 2.6.28-14-generic i686
UnreportableReason: This is not a genuine Ubuntu package

[Andrew Sayers (andrew-bugs-launchpad-net)]

I helped Jeremy to report this bug, so I'd like to make a few comments here about the problem. I've attached the IRC log where we discussed the issue.

The screenshots Jeremy attached were created by running `gnome-screenshot` from a script once every 3 minutes. The screenshots show letters in GNOME applications gradually fading to the foreground colour over about half an hour.

Particular applications affected include: the window manager, gedit and XChat
Non-affected applications include: xmessage

Jeremy has reinstalled Ubuntu many times from a CD that had been checked for errors. The same bug occurred each time he installed.

We believe this is a bug in GNOME because all GNOME applications seem to be affected, while non-GNOME applications (i.e. xmessage) are not affected.

[Chris Coulson (chrisccoulson)]

The last screenshot shows that xmessage is affected, so I don't think it's unique to GNOME applications. This is more likely a graphics driver issue, or failing hardware. I've seen graphics corruption like that before on an old NVIDIA card I had, and that was due to faulty video RAM.

[Jeremy (2jeremylee)]

Update; using the Ubuntu 9.04 CD for a live session I also encountered the same problem, however for a while the text in 'Text Editor' and 'Open Office' both cleared up at some point as the CD spun-up, after several minutes the highlighting started to happen again.
The last screenshot does appear to show xmessage being affected, but this is not the case, there is a residual image of the 'take screenshot box' that has been taken during the screenshot save. The text within the xmessage box was not affected at any point, however the heading 'xmessage' did start to become highlighted.

[Sergio Barjola (sbarjola)]

Can you attach /var/log/Xorg.0.log file and the output of 'lspci -vvnn' ? Thanks in advance.

[Jeremy (2jeremylee)]

Hi Sergio Barjola

Sorry, but I've reinstalled Windows XP on my computer, so I won't have any
history of the Ubuntu system.

Thanks for taking the time to look into this problem, but I've decided that
I'll stick with XP on this old laptop; but when I buy my next I'll go for
Ubuntu again.

Bye now, Jeremy Lee

[Sergio Barjola (sbarjola)]

closing this bug report because it lacks the information we need to investigate the problem. Please reopen it if you can give us the missing information, and don't hesitate to submit bug reports in the future. Thanks again!