Fedora 14 - fonts become corrupted (missing glyphs)

[ggambett]

I downloaded and installed Fedora 14 in a HP DV4 a few days ago. It mostly works, but I'm seeing an extremely strange problem. As I use the computer normally, some letters in some fonts appear to become corrupted, and replaced by a black square.

For example, after a few minutes, the "Y" in filenames in Rhythmbox gets replaced by a square. After a while, other letters "break" as well. This continues to the point everything becomes illegible and I have to reboot.

This seems to be font-dependent, as opening the terminal and typing Y produces a Y, for example.

Any ideas?

[AdamW]

this is usually a graphics driver bug. what graphics driver are you using? are you using compiz?

[ggambett]

Thanks for the reply. You're right, seems to be related to Compiz - if I disable Compiz, the "broken" letters stay broken, but no new letters break.

The video card is a ATI Radeon HD 4200, using the radeon driver that comes with F14.

[AdamW]

okay, yeah. I've seen a few cases of this happening. I believe the underlying cause is in the radeon driver. I'm not really sure if they're all one bug, or separate similar bugs. Let me see if I can find a currently-active report...

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=529081 is the report I can find, it may be better to open a new bug though as that has a lot of history.

[ggambett]

None of the screenshots exactly match what we're seeing here, but are similar enough to suggest it's the same (or a very similar) issue.

That bug is for F12 and is marked for closing unless the package maintainer marks it as F14. I can submit a new one for F14 and fresh screenshots if you want, just let me know. Also, please let me know if you want me to try anything else, or who should I contact to help debug and fix this.

[AdamW]

probably best to just go ahead and file a new report. the bug should get assigned to the right people, if you file it against the right component (xorg-x11-drv-ati).