For a while I have been experiencing some GUI redraw problems in both Ubuntu Intrepid and Ubuntu Jaunty that have severly affected the user experience. For example, in Geany, a text editor, when scrolling, parts of the text would disappear or appear in the wrong place giving a very buggy glitchy feel. Likewise, when using gnome-terminal and Tilda (another terminal), the display would often not redraw or text would appear in the wrong place. Worst of all was Openoffice Writer and VLC – where buttons or parts of the interface would simply disappear only to reappear when you mouseover!
I am running the latest stable Nvidia driver (180) from the main repositories and am using Compiz as a window manager. It turns out that this is a common problem (see launchpad bug here) and there is now a workaround that is easily implemented. The bug is related to Compiz and Nvidia and not the applications themselves. Here is the fix:
First install compizconfig-settings-manager if it is not already installed.
sudo apt-get install compizconfig-settings-manager
Launch CompizConfig Settings Manager
System -> Preferences -> CompizConfig Settings Manager
Now navigate to the utility section and click on the workarounds plugin. Enable the “force syncronization between X and GLX” option.
That’s it. The changes should be made effective immediately and hopefully you should not see any more artifacts or slow redraws when using the aforementioned applications. Hopefully this can be fixed properly by Nvidia or the Compiz developers sometime but for now this fix will do just fine.
