Under Debian Sid, for almost a week my Gnome desktop has been drawing incorrectly. It starts with the panels melding themselves together near the middle of the screen, then mouseover events on icons make everything worse. To sum it all up, it leaves a myriad of artifacts on the screen that makes it almost impossible to do almost anything. But at any rate, a picture is worth a thousand words, so the following link will show it in all its horrible glory.

i24.photobucket.com/albums/c47/an0therus3r/GNOMEprobs.png

Is there any way that this could get fixed, or am I stuck with it until it gets fixed upstream or in the debian packages?

Galeru

yeah, I would say that's 'almost' unusable

what makes you say this is a gnome problem? When did it start? (after upgrading?)
could it be a video card problem?... in which case a liveCD might be an appropriate test.

cheers

also, check you /var/log/Xorg.0.log for any relevent data and post it.

The main reason that I am supposing gnome is at fault and not X is because i can run KDE and have it act perfectly, while gnome does the entire, weird redraw whatnot. Additionally, I am fairly sure that it isn't any specific applications fault, because the bad redraws occur after the startup screen, but before i open any specific application, and because i can use Gnome Apps within KDE no problems.
Confusingly, when I use Firefox, or any other window that takes up the entire screen under Gnome, I do not get the bad redraws. It only occurs on the desktop itself. Does anyone have any clue as to what's going on?

Galeru

Ah, it is getting clearer
I am not aware of any known gnome bugs such as the one you describe. Reinstalling gnome may well fix it. This is gnome 2.12.x correct? (perhaps some rogue gnome package is at a lesser 2.10 release causing conflict)... I recently had a similar problem, but only affecting the gnome panels. I had updated gtk++. I discovered that I also had to update gnome-panels.
also you video drivers/settings may warrent investigation. I understand that kde doesn't have the same issue but they use different video sub-systems and you may be using different graphics features in each.

in KDE there is a a feature which allows you to run apps in the root (desktop) window, I don't think the same exists in gnome,... but this almost seems like you're running xscreensaver in the root window doesn't it? ...well not really.

out of curiosoty, it is the same on all workspaces correct? I notice you have 10 !

cheers

As it turns out, Gnome itself wasn't at 2.12 yet, but still at 2.10 while the panels and other apps were at 2.12. That would explain perfectly why it wasn't working correctly, and why it is working now. Anyways, I would like to thank you profusely for helping me out with this, nilleso. Nice to see that somebody cares about the clueless people. =) Also, 4 of those 10 boxes are actually system monitors for CPU, RAM, network activity and hard drive usage. 6 workspaces are plenty for me! Once again, thanks for all the help.

Galeru

glad to hear it's lookin pretty again