Ubuntu
gnome-shell package

Gnome-shell interface distorted and unusable (AMD graphics card?)

Bug #877655 reported by Ben Linsey-Bloom on 2011-10-18

This bug report is a duplicate of: Bug #838577: GNOME Shell display problems with FGLRX. Edit Remove

This bug affects 4 people

Affects		Status	Importance	Assigned to	Milestone
	GNOME Shell	New	Medium	gnome-bugs #652029
	gnome-shell (Ubuntu)	Confirmed	Undecided	Unassigned

Bug Description

I installed the gnome-shell package, logged out and selected 'GNOME' on the LightDM login screen. When I logged in all of the interface is blurry/garbled/distorted and text is unreadable. The desktop icons and applications like Nautilus are fine but the top panel, bottom notifications and the 'dashboard' thing were all basically unusable.

I tried uninstalling the proprietory AMD/ATI driver to see if the open source graphics driver worked better but after reboot selecting 'GNOME' at login took me to the same interface as 'GNOME CLASSIC'.

I'm using Ubuntu 11.10 with an AMD Radeon HD 5000 Series graphics card.

I've attached a screenshot of the broken Gnome Shell interface.

Revision history for this message

Ben Linsey-Bloom (ben-kitserve) wrote on 2011-10-18:

gnome-shell-broken.png Edit (444.8 KiB, image/png)

Revision history for this message

Launchpad Janitor (janitor) wrote on 2011-10-19:

Status changed to 'Confirmed' because the bug affects multiple users.

Changed in gnome-shell (Ubuntu):
status:	New → Confirmed

Bug Watch Updater (bug-watch-updater) on 2011-10-19

Changed in gnome-shell:
importance:	Unknown → Medium
status:	Unknown → New

Revision history for this message

Jeremy Bícha (jbicha) wrote on 2011-10-20:

This is a problem with the fglrx drivers which should be improved in the next version.

I'm guessing that the open source drivers don't yet support the required 3D on your hardware that GNOME Shell needs, and therefore Ubuntu automatically falls back to the GNOME Fallback desktop environment.