splashutils with fbcondecor kills fonts in X

sgarcia

This is weird.

I've been fiddling with splashutils trying to get a nice, pretty framebuffer boot. This is the last customization I have left before this T61 (Intel video) is where I want it. Wifi (with the LED) works, sound works, Compiz-Fusion works...

Well, after lots of iterations, I managed to get the framebuffer to work, but without an image. I got the two penguins and a high-res font, and a message that splashutils hadn't been compiled with fbcondecor, so I figured I was almost there. I rebuilt splashutils with fbcondecor, rebuilt the kernel, and rebooted.

And there it was! A 1680x1050 "emergence" background as the boot messages scrolled by. Success! GDM started.

And then the troubles began. I typed in my username. It displayed as all blanks. I typed in my password. It displayed as all blanks. Gnome loaded.

There was no text. All the menus (and most of the widget icons) were AWOL. If I clicked (by guesswork) on where an icon belonged, I got an appropriate sized dialog box, and if there were supposed to be buttons, the outline of those buttons. No text, no icons. I changed to one of my virtual terminals, and the emergence splash image glowed cheerfully at me. I could log in. I rebooted and loaded a non splash enabled kernel, and when X loaded this time, all was well with the world.

I blamed zen-sources. They must have broken fbcondecor, dang it! So I used one of my older kernels (bye-bye Wifi LED) and used my hard won wisdom to enable fbcondecor with it. Emergence displayed beautifully, but when GDM loaded and I typed my username, it was all blanks. Gnome was again broken. Zen-sources was exonerated.

I've changed all sorts of things in the kernel -- compiled fonts in, left them out, every combination I could think of. I've finally narrowed it down to this: it doesn't seem to be related to the kernel. If I add "fbcondecor" to the USE list and then build splashutils, the next kernel I build will have a working verbose splash, but X will be broken. If I rebuild splashutils with "-fbcondecor" I will get a splash screen with the correct resolution but no image, and X will be fine. If I leave the splash line out of the grub command (and don't build it into initramfs) then I get no splash at all, and X works.

I started with the stable splashutils, and have since changed to ~x86, which required ~x86 for genkernel as well. Didn't make any difference.

Anybody have any suggestions?
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Ignorance killed the cat. Curiosity was framed.

pappy_mcfae · Posted: Sun Jun 22, 2008 7:49 am Post subject:

Blame compiz. That is one of the many foibles that made me decide I'd wait until someone REALLY made it into a desktop system in its own right; a self-starter, so to speak. It was pretty, but it was also pretty buggy. I don't really miss it. It's nifty to look at, but it's a PITA to deal with.

Blessed be!
Pappy
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sgarcia · Posted: Mon Jun 23, 2008 12:29 am Post subject:

Well, that was a credible possibility, but I disabled Compiz and tried it, and the problem still occurs.

Also, it starts before you've even logged in -- GDM is broken, and I don't think Compiz is even running at that point anyway.
_________________
Ignorance killed the cat. Curiosity was framed.

pappy_mcfae · Posted: Mon Jun 23, 2008 8:34 am Post subject:

So the next thing would be to fix gdm, or use kdm and see if it works better.

Blessed be!
Pappy
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This space left intentionally blank, except for these ASCII symbols.

sgarcia · Posted: Mon Jun 23, 2008 3:43 pm Post subject:

Well, here's the score so far: