GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 487670
Whenever I move the mouse over an open file little green trails are created
Last modified: 2008-10-30 20:01:21 UTC
So I launch gimp by clicking on a picture file from the Ubuntu desktop. As I drag around the mouse little green trails are created. If I move the tool pallete over the picture, it erases the green trails but leaves blocks. If I minimize and then maximize the window the trails go away. I have documented this in this Ubuntu forums thread. http://ubuntuforums.org/showpost.php?p=3547281&postcount=29 And I have noticed that someone in the Fedora forum has this same problem. http://www.fedoraforum.org/forum/showthread.php?t=168979 I have no idea what is causing this. Could be graphics card driver related given the circumstances of my situation in the Ubuntu thread. Could be rc3 related.
http://bugzilla.gnome.org/dupfinder/simple-dup-finder.cgi?id=487670 Could be a duplicate of bug #421466.
Please try to put the line (xor-color (color-rgb 1.0 1.0 1.0)) into your ~/.gimp-2.4/gimprc file. Please report back if this fixes your problem.
So interestingly enough I didn't have a gimprc file. I created one and added your line, and now have white rectangular trails overdrawing everything. So since Michael's comment I switched back to my windows boot partition and installed GIMP 2.4-rc3. I noticed that people who had this problem seemed to have ATI Radeon cards. I have the Radeon 7000 and have been having trouble getting the 3d accleration working in Ubuntu 7.10. So on the windows side there was no green trail, on the same hardware. However there is a little dashed rectangle in the upper right corner of the mouse cursor in the windows version, that is not visible when running Ubuntu. This little dashed rectangle is exactly the shape of the rectangle that I am generating in Ubuntu with the mouse trails. So I am thinking that the freeware ATI driver that ships with xorg-server that is packaged with Ubuntu has some kind of bug in it, that is related to what you guys are doing with the mouse cursor in your linux distro of GIMP. Why only part of the cursor would be creating trails I am not sure. But the situation is that the little dashed rectangle is not visible and that it is creating trails, and that when you create a gimprc file with the lisp code in it the mouse trail becomes white rather than green. What can I do to help resolve this? Is there some bug that you can send me off with to the guys responsible for the ATI driver? This is not the fglrx driver by the way its the freeware one.
This is a known problem of the ATI driver for certain cards and it can usually be worked around by changing the XOR color as we explained to you. If it turns out however that you didn't have a gimprc file, then your installation is completely b0rked and it is pointless trying to fix this particular problem until you have figured out what went wrong with the installation of the gimp user directory. For now we will close this report as a duplicate of the bug that deals with the XOR problem. *** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of 421466 ***
So I got gimp via the standard install of Ubuntu. I am currently running 7.10, have been running it in beta. So if there's a problem we should probably report it Ubuntu people, which I will do if you can point to some documentation or explain how the install should work. In my home/username/.gimp2-4/ directory there was no gimprc. There appears to be one in /etc/gimp/2.0 directory. This bug does appear to be the same as 421466, which would make it entirely due to the codepath in the ATI driver as documented on the other thread. This is especially true, since I was able to add a gimprc file to my home/username/.gimp2-4/ and put your lisp code in it and see white trails rather than green ones. But since this work around only changes the color of the mouse trails and doesn't fix the issue, what steps can I take to actually fix this? I imagine there must be thousands of users with similar hardware that will be in the same position. Any recommendation on where I would find the people responsible for the ATI driver so I can get this bug on their list and work as a tester to help it be resolved?
Oh, so you had the ~/.gimp-2.4 directory, just no gimprc file? That is fine then. In that case the defaults are used. And if you never changed any default, then there is no gimprc file. The workaround I showed you seems to work for other people, they don't get white mouse trails.
Do you want some screen shots? it's basically just drawing little white dashed boxes on every mouse move event, rather than little green dashed boxes with your lisp code. What can I do to help you or the freeware ATI driver guys fix this? I'll test. I'll write test code. I'll learn about GIMP and linux driver internals. I'll even try to contribute some newbie attempted code to your code base after several weeks of learning how things work if you like. I just want to use GIMP 2.4.rc3 without this visual bug on Ubuntu 7.10. How can I help?
You should aks the driver developers what you should do. I can't help you. All GIMP is doing is simple XOR drawing. There are hundreds of applications doing that. Most of them use white as the XOR drawing color. Some drivers seems to choke on other colors, but drawing XOR with white should really just work fine.
Note also that if you are using the gimprc option as I suggested, then GIMP 2.4 does exactly what GIMP 2.2 used to do. So you should have had the same problem with 2.2 already.
I guess I need to correct myself here. GIMP 2.2 didn't draw a brush outline. So if this problem only shows up with paint tools and if it goes away when you add (show-brush-outline no) to your gimprc, then the driver has problems drawing dotted XOR lines (actually dashed lines with a dash pattern consisting of a single 1-pixel segment). We didn't use such a line style in GIMP 2.2.
It is not exactly the same in 2.2. IIRC I changed the drawing used in the Graphics Context from GDK_INVERT to GDK_XOR. One could try to implement a special case for the color white and use GDK_INVERT then. It is very well possible that this causes different code paths to be used in the graphics driver.
(show-brush-outline no) does prevent the trails! Awesome! How do I report the driver bug?
We can't tell you how to report a bug in your graphics driver, that is out of our business.
https://bugs.freedesktop.org/ is where to report Xorg driver problems. This is, well, linked from the front page of the Xorg website. You should double check first that ubuntu is shipping the latest driver release.