Comment 219 for bug 353126

Revision history for this message
Sandro Mani (sandromani) wrote : Re: Compiz / vnc screen refresh with nvidia-restricted driver/VirtualBox/ATI fglrx driver using X.org prior to release 7.5

"The remote desktop solution in Ubuntu uses the VNC backend which can't read from hardware accelerated display"

That's hardly true, testing on a few xserver 7.5 machines (running fedora 12 but that should not make any difference)
* intel + compiz + xdamage enabled = no problem
* open source radeonhd + compiz + xdamage enabled = no problem
* binary nvidia + compiz + xdamage enabled = screen does not refresh
* binary nvidia + compiz + xdamage disabled = no problem

Hence it really looks like only the binary drivers (at least nvidia, haven't tested fglrx) are affected. And when using binary drivers, disabling xdamage in gconf: /desktop/gnome/remote_access/disable_xdamage should suffice (and this imo whould be something that could be done automatically when a user installs a binary driver through the repos).

For people experiencing this issue with open source drivers on a clean lucid install / live cd, they might want to give the fedora 12 / 13 live cds a try, just in case it were indeed a problem affecting only ubuntu.