GDM's default field of brown does not render so well on large LCD monitors

[Matt Edwards]

First impression is important. Upon login, the default field of brown displayed
by gdm appears banded on large LCD monitors. These monitors render white and
black very well. Black complements Ubuntu's default splash screen very well.

[Jeff Waugh (jdub)]

Should be fixed in breezy's artwork, reopen if that's not the case.

[Duncan Lithgow (duncan-lithgow)]

I'm reopening this as I think this problem has persisted ever since. It has for me at least. On my Ubuntu 7.04 (Feisty Fawn) install the login background and the desktop background are both clearly banded.

If the problem is that LCD screens don't have enough color depth to make the background and fade look good, then the solution would be to dither the color crossovers. I have attached some examples in PNG format. I've used the login screen background as that's not generally user configured.

* login-now.png - how the login screen looks on my laptop now
* login-spreadx3 - the current screen after three passes of the Gimp filter 'Filters > Noise> Spread'
* login-scatter(RGB).png - the current screen after the filter 'Filters > Noise > Scatter RGB'
* login-scatter(HSV)x2.png - the current screen after 2 passes of 'Filters > Noise > Scatter HSV'

The scattered versions look much better on my screen than the original.

[Duncan Lithgow (duncan-lithgow)]

login-now.png

[Duncan Lithgow (duncan-lithgow)]

login-scatter(HSV)x2.png

[Duncan Lithgow (duncan-lithgow)]

login-scatter(RGB).png

[Duncan Lithgow (duncan-lithgow)]

login-spreadx3.png

[Manu Cornet (lmanul)]

On my screen (also LCD):

* login-now: looks great
* login-scatter(HSV)x2.png: no visible difference with login-now
* login-scatter(RGB).png: a few white dots in the U and the B, otherwise no visible difference
* login-spreadx3.png: looks terrible, completely blurred

[Duncan Lithgow (duncan-lithgow)]

I should have mentioned that the distortions of the logo and login box are not relevant - it's just the background I'm interested in.

[Kenneth Wimer (kwwii)]

This is interesting, as I have 3 laptops and the pic looks fine on every lcd. Which resolution are you running?

In fact, on my screens I see about the same thing as reported above.

[Duncan Lithgow (duncan-lithgow)]

Okay, a bit more hunting and this is because I was running the nv driver and not the nvidia closed source driver. So I assume that the nv driver wasn't supporting the full capacity of the graphics card. But now I can't see what package to report this against - there is no 'nv' package. Can someone help me there?

[Kenneth Wimer (kwwii)]

 xserver-xorg-video-nv seems to be the right package

[Duncan Lithgow (duncan-lithgow)]

"No results found for keyword 'xserver-xorg-video-nv'." Can't find it Kenneth.

[etteyafed (gdefayette)]

I am not sure that this is a bug. Maybe put it on the wish list. If it is an Image issue it is a matter of "It would be nice if..." and if it is an issue with the development status of the open source
nvidia driver then it is still an issue of not having a desired feature (ie. better image rendering). I have noticed that the nv driver produces inferior images in some cases. I think we should change the importance of this. I will confirm this issue, but I don't think we need do anything about it except continue to work on and improve the relevant open source graphics drivers.

[Duncan Lithgow (duncan-lithgow)]

I reopened this bug and found since that the problem was hardware and not this bug. Marking as 'Fix released'