Public bug reported:
Binary package hint: nvidia-glx
I tried using the nvidia-glx proprietary graphics driver on Ubuntu
Feisty. However, the driver is completely unusable on my system, it
messes up the entire screen with graphical noise and a lot of glitches,
for example:
1) When scrolling up or down in any widget, the lines get mixed up. This
applies to lists as well as textboxes and every other control that has
scrollbars. I observed it in Gedit, Gnome Control Center, Synaptic,
Gnome Terminal etc. pp.
2) Using the driver causes the System to crash withaut any apparent
cause. I haven't been able to find any steps to reproduce these crashes,
they seem to happen randomly.
3) The area that was obscured by a window or menu is not properly
redrawn when the window is moved or the menu is closed. The formerly-
obscured area is filled with graphical noise, every now and then mixing
in what seems to be distorted pixmaps from some kind of cache (see below
for the origin of these pixmaps)
4) The pixmaps that show up in these areas seem to originate from some
kind of cache. For instance, on one occasion i spotted the background
image from a website which i visited with firefox some minutes earlier.
On another occasion, it showed what looked like a distorted screenshot
of evolution, probably cached by the X server.
5) The most interesting observation is: This "screenshot" of evolution
was actually from evolution running on Edgy Eft, wich is installed on
another partition of the same machine. I was quite perplexed by this,
but its a fact: I never configured evolution in Feisty, so there are no
emails in my inbox. The "screenshot" however clearly showed emails that
i had received earlier that day when running evolution on Edgy Eft. On
this machine, Edgy and Feisty are installed in different partitions, but
they share a swap partition. My guess is that Edgy's X server cached the
pixmap of evolution, that it got stored in the swap partition, and that
later, when I was running Feisty, it somehow was rendered onto the
desktop instead of the background image.
This behaviour makes the proprietary nvidia driver unusable. The free nv
driver works correctly, but using it means to completely sacrifice any
3D acceleration. I noticed these things in every 1.0.9xxx version of
nvidia's driver that i have tried, including the driver currently
included in ubuntu's repository (1.0.9631+2.6.20.2-8.6). The 1.0.7xxx
and 1.0.8xxx drivers worked flawlessly.
Painting random pixmaps from some X cache is also a serious security
breach; showing a "screenshot" of evolution, with emails recently
received by a different user running a different operating system
installed in a different partition is clearly unacceptable.
I have added my xorg.conf, two screenshots, and a theora screencast to
give you an impression of this bug. On one of the screenshots, you can
spot a distorted pixmap of the Alacarte menu editor, which i opened and
closed some minutes earlier. The title bar is clearly visible at the
bottom of the image.
** Affects: linux-restricted-modules-2.6.20 (Ubuntu)
Importance: Undecided
Status: Unconfirmed
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In Feisty Fawn, nvidia-glx 1.0.9xxx causes graphical glitches, artifacts and
random system crashes
https://launchpad.net/bugs/85449
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