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0e1f616
(Get the code!)
> any update on this?
Yes. I have run through testing this on various combinations of graphics cards and video drivers for both natty and oneiric while running Unity. In this testing I was able to reproduce the bug only with fglrx-installer and the old nvidia-173 proprietary drivers. The free drivers worked properly. The nvidia-current driver worked fine as well, even in natty.
Thus, I confirm Pitti's earlier statement that this is an fglrx specific bug.
As a next action for this bug, Canonical will escalate to AMD. There is insufficient time remaining for a fix to be included in oneiric, but we may be able to provide an updated driver via x-updates; as of oneiric jockey (aka 'Restricted Drivers') will be able to load driver updates from this repository.
No promises for earlier Ubuntu releases, however if we provide driver updates it will be via the x-updates PPA. Otherwise, you can download and manually install new drivers from AMD directly, but note these are not supported by Ubuntu.
Alternatively, the open source -ati driver supports the full range of ATI chipsets; it doesn't have as rich of 3D support as fglrx but it has sufficient support to run Unity reasonably well. So as another workaround you should be able to disable fglrx and run using just the open source driver.
Similarly, for those users on older NVIDIA hardware not supported by nvidia-current, the -nouveau driver is available, and as of oneiric also supports 3D unity. It also lacks the level of 3D support that the proprietary driver has, but is sufficient for running unity.
And of course, Unity-2D remains a suitable workaround.
We had also considered the option of dropping Vino from the distro entirely. However I think this is unnecessary; the bug seems localized to just certain video drivers, and there are multiple ways of working around it. I also am hopeful we can get a fix for fglrx in the not too distant future. This seems like a handy feature and would be a shame to lose it over what appears to be just a single driver bug.