X started by lightdm renders X11 screen ugly/unusable

[Hadmut Danisch]

Hi,

after upgrading my system to oneiric, the X11 desktop is ugly and almost unusable, because the fonts and characters are stretched horizontally and blurred.

I guess that the reason is a wrong/odd dpi value, because xdpyinfo says

screen #0:
  dimensions: 1600x1200 pixels (473x302 millimeters)
  resolution: 86x101 dots per inch

I would prefer to simply give X a better dpi value as a command line argument, but as far as I can see that lightdm does not allow to configure any command line parameters for X (which I consider as broken design).

Please tell me how oneiric is supposed to deal with that problem.

ProblemType: Bug
DistroRelease: Ubuntu 11.10
Package: lightdm 1.0.5-0ubuntu1
ProcVersionSignature: Ubuntu 3.0.0-13.21-generic 3.0.6
Uname: Linux 3.0.0-13-generic x86_64
ApportVersion: 1.23-0ubuntu4
Architecture: amd64
Date: Sun Oct 30 00:03:48 2011
EcryptfsInUse: Yes
InstallationMedia: Ubuntu 10.04 LTS "Lucid Lynx" - Release amd64 (20100427.1)
ProcEnviron:
 PATH=(custom, user)
 LANG=en_US.UTF-8
 SHELL=/bin/tcsh
SourcePackage: lightdm
UpgradeStatus: Upgraded to oneiric on 2011-10-29 (0 days ago)

[Hadmut Danisch (hadmut)]

Interestingly, after rebooting twice (and starting xfce4 as a first desktop) X11 came up with a correct dpi value of 96x96, and everything looked well again. So it's definitely a problem of the dpi settings.

Furthermore, I experienced similar problems with odd and asymetric dpi values on my notebook with oneric too. So it's a general problem.

Since I was hunting another problem and sometimes booted both machines in the so called "recovery boot mode" without that initial splash screen, I guess that this might be the problem: If the splash screen hasn't been run at boot time, ubuntu/lightdm/X11 seem to have problems with finding good dpi values (or maybe strictly calculates them from the physical screen size reported from the display, thus getting these odd values).

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

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

[penalvch (penalvch)]

Hadmut Danisch, this bug was reported a while ago and there hasn't been any activity in it recently. We were wondering if this is still an issue? If so, could you please test for this with the latest development release of Ubuntu? ISO images are available from http://cdimage.ubuntu.com/daily-live/current/ .

If it remains an issue, could you please run the following command in the development release from a Terminal (Applications->Accessories->Terminal), as it will automatically gather and attach updated debug information to this report:

apport-collect -p xorg-server REPLACE-WITH-BUG-NUMBER

Please note, given that the information from the prior release is already available, doing this on a release prior to the development one would not be helpful.

Thank you for your understanding.

Helpful bug reporting tips:
https://wiki.ubuntu.com/ReportingBugs

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

[Expired for xorg-server (Ubuntu) because there has been no activity for 60 days.]