The gnome-system-monitor application window is gibberrish.

[Tharakan]

Binary package hint: gnome-system-monitor

For some wierd reason, the application window (and just inside the window) the content is all gibberrish. Just arbit lines and dots ... if you see the screenshot you'll understand what I mean.

A few things, which may help in isolating the case.

1. The gibberrish moves every second, so i means that the application is working and is rendering 'data' but the output is junk
2. Alt-H works (and two 'up' arrow keys lead to 'Report a bug' works too) ... and thats how I made this bug report... So the application is almost certainly working fine.
3. Haven't seen this peculiar thing with any other application yet, just upgrade from 9.04 yesterday. for e.g. Firefox / Empathy / terminal ... etc. havent had this issue at all.
4. Even the window borders are curved, so I am quite sure this is related to how contents are displayed within the application.

=================
lsb_release -rd

Description: Ubuntu 9.10
Release: 9.10
=================
apt-cache policy gnome-system-monitor

gnome-system-monitor:
  Installed: 2.28.0-0ubuntu1
  Candidate: 2.28.0-0ubuntu1
  Version table:
 *** 2.28.0-0ubuntu1 0
        500 http://in.archive.ubuntu.com karmic/main Packages
        100 /var/lib/dpkg/status

ProblemType: Bug
Architecture: i386
Date: Tue Nov 17 01:52:45 2009
DistroRelease: Ubuntu 9.10
ExecutablePath: /usr/bin/gnome-system-monitor
Package: gnome-system-monitor 2.28.0-0ubuntu1
ProcEnviron:
 PATH=(custom, user)
 LANG=en_IN
 SHELL=/bin/bash
ProcVersionSignature: Ubuntu 2.6.31-14.48-generic
SourcePackage: gnome-system-monitor
Uname: Linux 2.6.31-14-generic i686

[Tharakan (tharakan)]

And yes, it is very much repeatable.
Happens, every time I open gnome-system-monitor.

This is an old Dell laptop, 7 year old, P4, 384 MB Ram, and I doubt it'd have a good recent video card.

In case its important, don't mind giving more info about the laptop per say.. (Just tell me how to get the info though..).

[Steve McGrath (smcgrath23)]

Could run the following command in a terminal and attach the resulting file to this report?

lspci -vvvv > lspci.txt

I suspect that this is bug #426582, if you have an ATI Radeon Mobility graphics chip.

The hardware information from lspci will let us determine if this is the case.

Thanks in advance.

[Tharakan (tharakan)]

You're right Steve.
It does seem like the same case.

File attached.

[Steve McGrath (smcgrath23)]

Indeed. That's the exact same graphics chip as in my laptop that exhibits this problem. So, I'm marking this as a duplicate of Bug #426582.

There's a wealth of information referenced in that report that may help you work around this.

Thanks for reporting!