10.4, poor font rendering and other asorted screen damage

[Gene Heskett]

On Monday 03 May 2010, Mark Greenwood wrote:
>>On Monday 03 May 2010 03:47:24 Gene Heskett wrote:
>> Greetings;
>>
>> Installed 10.4 yesterday & it seems to work ok on a box with less that
>> stellar speed potential, but with one caveat:
>>
>> The font rendering in some programs sucks, or screen damages are not
>> being redrawn, take your pick, it seems to depend on the program.
>>
>> Font rendering is pretty bad in firefox, and I believe much the same
>> problem exists in the card games as there is all sorts of trash left
>> behind when you move a card.
>>
>> A bash shell OTOH, renders perfectly and can be scrolled either direction
>> without showing any screen damages there.  But gedit can become almost
>> unreadable.
>>
>> Is this a known problem?
>>
>> Thanks.
>
>I had something similar after a fresh install. It was all looking OK until
> I installed the nvidia driver. What I did was to install the msttcorefonts
> package and choose a TrueType font as my default font (I use Verdana). I
> also enabled Anti-Aliasing, then rebooted. Somehow this cleared the
> problem.
>
>Mark
>
Thanks Mark, I'll give that a shot at least.  But I don't see the connection 
between that and all the screen damages when playing Klondike solitaire.

I forgot to mention that it is an rv280 based video card, an ATI 9200SE, AGP, 
using the radeon driver.  I am using that driver on this machine also, but 
its an Rv610 2400-Pro card, and I do not see 99% of the screen damages I see 
on that machine.

TBT, the driver shipping, and the kernel shipping, are known baddies on this 
machine.  So I build and run kernel.org kernels here as there are changes in 
the drm in the 2.6.34-rcx kernels that fix some other very obnoxious 
problems, like screen blankers going crazy & you can't do much besides a hdwe 
button reset/reboot to fix it, for 10 minutes to 3 or 4 hours of peace each 
time.  Until you forget, and something touches the right edge of the screen 
and its off to the races again.

I am one of those who run the latest kernel.org kernels, and have been since 
2.0 days.  Something like the canary in the coal mine.  So far, knock on 
wood, the 2.6.34-rc2 thru rc6 kernels have been dead stable here.

-- 
Cheers, Gene
"There are four boxes to be used in defense of liberty:
 soap, ballot, jury, and ammo. Please use in that order."
-Ed Howdershelt (Author)
Any program will expand to fill available memory. 
	-- Murphy's Laws of Computer Programming n�11