Disappearing/Reappearing toolbar causes magical shrinking gnome-terminal window

[Jeff Lane ]

On a fresh install of Oneiric Alpha 3 on a Dell Lattitude 2120 I opened an instance of Gnome Terminal. On opening, the menu bar below the window's titlebar started flashing on and off. Every time it flashed OFF, the terminal window would shrink by the height of the menu bar. Thus, I have witnessed the miracle of the Magical Shrinking Terminal!

I was hoping that this would simply continue shrinking into nothing, or perhaps it would shrink into itself and create a black hole, slowly sucking in the entire desktop around it, a few pixels at a time. But that didn't happen, the terminal shrank to rougly 2 lines height and there the shrinkage stopped.

I ran ubuntu-bug and when that launched Firefox, I noticed that, lo and behold, Firefox ALSO suffers from flashing menu bar syndrome. The only difference is that the FireFox window does not shrink, it simply resizes itself accordingly.

ProblemType: Bug
DistroRelease: Ubuntu 11.10
Package: unity 4.6.0-0ubuntu1
ProcVersionSignature: Ubuntu 3.0.0-7.9-generic 3.0.0
Uname: Linux 3.0.0-7-generic i686
Architecture: i386
BootLog:
 fsck from util-linux 2.19.1
 /dev/sda1: clean, 144264/19406848 files, 1891786/77620736 blocks
 Skipping profile in /etc/apparmor.d/disable: usr.bin.firefox
CompizPlugins: [core,bailer,detection,composite,opengl,decor,mousepoll,vpswitch,regex,animation,snap,expo,move,compiztoolbox,place,grid,imgpng,gnomecompat,wall,ezoom,workarounds,staticswitcher,resize,fade,unitymtgrabhandles,scale,session,unityshell]
CompositorRunning: compiz
Date: Mon Aug 8 15:32:13 2011
DistUpgraded: Fresh install
DistroCodename: oneiric
DistroVariant: ubuntu
GraphicsCard:
 Intel Corporation N10 Family Integrated Graphics Controller [8086:a011] (rev 02) (prog-if 00 [VGA controller])
   Subsystem: Dell Device [1028:04a5]
   Subsystem: Dell Device [1028:04a5]
InstallationMedia: Ubuntu 11.10 "Oneiric Ocelot" - Alpha i386 (20110803.1)
LightdmGreeterLog:

MachineType: Dell Inc. Latitude 2120
ProcEnviron:
 LANG=en_US.UTF-8
 SHELL=/bin/bash
ProcKernelCmdLine: BOOT_IMAGE=/boot/vmlinuz-3.0.0-7-generic root=UUID=08fbc92a-95f3-46a5-b5ea-ea48d3df5663 ro quiet splash initcall_debug vt.handoff=7
SourcePackage: unity
UpgradeStatus: No upgrade log present (probably fresh install)
dmi.bios.date: 10/06/2010
dmi.bios.vendor: Dell Inc.
dmi.bios.version: W06
dmi.board.name: DOE3C2
dmi.board.vendor: Dell Inc.
dmi.chassis.type: 8
dmi.chassis.vendor: Dell Inc.
dmi.modalias: dmi:bvnDellInc.:bvrW06:bd10/06/2010:svnDellInc.:pnLatitude2120:pvr:rvnDellInc.:rnDOE3C2:rvr:cvnDellInc.:ct8:cvr:
dmi.product.name: Latitude 2120
dmi.sys.vendor: Dell Inc.
version.compiz: compiz 1:0.9.5.0-0ubuntu2
version.libdrm2: libdrm2 2.4.26-1ubuntu1
version.libgl1-mesa-dri: libgl1-mesa-dri 7.11~1-0ubuntu4
version.libgl1-mesa-dri-experimental: libgl1-mesa-dri-experimental N/A
version.libgl1-mesa-glx: libgl1-mesa-glx 7.11~1-0ubuntu4
version.xserver-xorg: xserver-xorg 1:7.6+7ubuntu6
version.xserver-xorg-input-evdev: xserver-xorg-input-evdev 1:2.6.0-1ubuntu13
version.xserver-xorg-video-ati: xserver-xorg-video-ati 1:6.14.2-1ubuntu2
version.xserver-xorg-video-intel: xserver-xorg-video-intel 2:2.15.0-3ubuntu2
version.xserver-xorg-video-nouveau: xserver-xorg-video-nouveau 1:0.0.16+git20110411+8378443-1

[Jeff Lane  (bladernr)]

Here's a video showing the flashing menu bars and the Magical Shrinking Terminal!

[Jeff Lane  (bladernr)]

Here's another video. After updating my fresh Alpha 3 install to the latest updates, I noticed that the BACKGROUND was actually hopping up and down as well, in the same cadence as the on again off again menu bars.

So here's a trippy short video of the dancing background on Oneiric Alpha 3... reminds me on one summer long ago at a Grateful Dead show ;-)

[Omer Akram (om26er)]

So basically the issue is not reproduce able its just a random bug
that is happening.

[Daniel Manrique (roadmr)]

Hi Jeff,

Could you confirm whether this procedure stops the dancing menu?

1- Open "Universal Access"
2- Enable and then disable "screen reading". You'll hear the welcome message from Orca.

This should make things work correctly.

If so, then this is a duplicate of bug 798078 in unity-panel-service. In your particular installation environment, it's caused by this command in the preseed file:

gconftool-2 --set --type bool /desktop/gnome/interface/accessibility true

If this doesn't help, then well, disregard this comment :)

[Daniel Manrique (roadmr)]

Also, I reported this behavior in this other bug:

bug 810145

I'm setting this to confirmed, because of bug 810145 which was last observed on Alpha 3 and also because I know my installation environment is very similar to yours and I also observed this :)

[Jeff Lane  (bladernr)]

Omar, it is quite reproducible apparently, as both Daniel and Myself have seen this issue. Given that this is the first time I encountered this, Daniel's workaround using Universal Access resolves the jumping menu bar issues on my systems.

[Jeff Lane  (bladernr)]

Removing the single-occurance tag since I've now seen this on several different systems (as has Daniel).

[Jean-Baptiste Lallement (jibel)]

Jeff, was accessibility enabled ?

[Jeff Lane  (bladernr)]

It was. The workaround is to open the accessibility menu and toggle the screen reader on and off a couple times. This seems to cause the problem to stop.

[Jeff Lane  (bladernr)]

I should add, Daniel's comments above (#5) detail the workaround for this.

[tim (acmeinc)]

I've had this problem in Xubuntu 10.04 using the xfce4-terminal. I am yet to reproduce in 12.04 however.

[Alex Baggott (alex-baggott)]

Sorry folks, but as part of the bug clean up ahead of 16.04 LTS, I'm marking this as invalid because it affects an Ubuntu release which is now unsupported. If you can still recreate this bug in a supported release, please do open a new bug and we can triage it for consideration in the 16.04 LTS development cycle.