Slackware-current: Is there any way to *completely* get rid of Xinerama?

folkenfanel · 01-11-2011, 10:49 PM

Dear Fellow Slackers:

I have recently upgraded to -current. I am mostly happy, except for one only tiny thing: my fonts look really, really ugly on OpenOffice.org 3.2.1.

All other apps show the fonts decently. I even installed the MS2007 fonts, which properly set up look smoothly antialiased (even in Firefox). But all fonts look horrible on OOO.

After doing some research about the cause of this ugliness, I came to found some light here:

http://www.openoffice.org/FAQs/fontguide.html

Quote:

OpenOffice.org uses XFonts as well as fonts that are rendered through FreeType as explained below. While it is possible to have FreeType rasterized fonts displayed antialiased this functionality isn't not implemented for XFonts.

Also, not all displays allow antialiasing. Antialiasing is either provided by the X Rendering extension of an XFree86 XServer or by drawing text by means of getting and putting images (XGetImage/XPutImage) from and to the window.

For proper antialiasing use XFree86, revisions 4.0.2, 4.0.3, 4.1, or 4.2 (or higher). Antialiasing is not used when OpenOffice.org detects the X Rendering extension (Render) together with a Xinerama extension. Antialiasing is also disabled on color displays of 8 bit depth (8 bit PseudoColor visuals).

My display is not 8 bit depth. So it could have some link to the presence of Render with Xinerama. (using the Intel driver by the way)

Both "xdpyinfo | grep XINERAMA" and "xdpyinfo | grep RENDER" tests positive. So the problem could be related to a bad interaction of these two extensions.

I did some research about how to disable Xinerama. So I added this to my xorg.conf:

Code:

Section "ServerFlags"
    Option "Xinerama" "0"
EndSection

After restarting X, there still was a XINERAMA extension loaded, and OOO looked as ugly as before.

From my xorg log file, only the important lines:

Code:

[  4575.586] (**) Option "Xinerama" "0"
[  4575.907] (II) intel(0): RandR 1.2 enabled, ignore the following RandR disabled message.
[  4575.910] (II) intel(0): direct rendering: DRI2 Enabled
[  4575.910] (--) RandR disabled
[  4575.910] (II) Initializing built-in extension XINERAMA
[  4575.910] (II) Initializing built-in extension RENDER
[  4575.910] (II) Initializing built-in extension RANDR
[  4575.910] (II) Initializing built-in extension COMPOSITE
[  4575.933] (II) AIGLX: GLX_EXT_texture_from_pixmap backed by buffer objects
[  4575.933] (II) AIGLX: Loaded and initialized /usr/lib/xorg/modules/dri/i915_dri.so
[  4575.933] (II) GLX: Initialized DRI2 GL provider for screen 0

It parses and properly recognizes the option from xorg.conf; but it somehow disobeys and activates the evil extension anyway.

If there is any way to a)disable/kill Xinerama; or b)deuglyfing OOO, I would be interested to know.

Any way that doesn't involve recompiling some things (not that I wouldn't want to recompile X without Xinerama support for instance -that could be fun-, but there must be a way to do it without recompiling).

dive · 01-12-2011, 01:50 PM

I'm using the same version OOo in 13.1 and the option for font antialiasing makes a visible difference. I don't have any problems with xinerama and can switch on/off AA.

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