Bug 209314

Summary: mathematica display is garbled -- motif problem? composite extension problem?
Product: [Fedora] Fedora Reporter: Garrett Mitchener <garrett.mitchener>
Component: xorg-x11Assignee: X/OpenGL Maintenance List <xgl-maint>
Status: CLOSED CANTFIX QA Contact: David Lawrence <dkl>
Severity: medium Docs Contact:
Priority: medium    
Version: 6   
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Hardware: x86_64   
OS: Linux   
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Last Closed: 2006-10-05 11:31:04 UTC Type: ---
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A screen shot of mathematica gone haywire none

Description Garrett Mitchener 2006-10-04 15:40:41 UTC 
Description of problem:

When I run mathematica, the program operates mostly normally, but the display is
messed up.  The background of all the widgets is some combination of stuff from
elsewhere on the screen.

Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable):

xorg-x11-server-Xorg-1.1.1-44.fc6, using the ATI proprietary driver 8.29.6 for
firegl v3400, and mathematica 5.1 for linux x86_64

Mathematica seems to use some version of motif, statically linked.

It looks almost like the transparent terminal windows some people use, so my
first guess is that it's some incompatibility with one of these new extensions.  

Mathematica 5.1 works fine on i386 under FC5.
Comment 1 Garrett Mitchener 2006-10-04 15:40:42 UTC 
Created attachment 137748 [details]
A screen shot of mathematica gone haywire
Comment 2 Kristian Høgsberg 2006-10-04 17:25:12 UTC 
This could well be a composite issue - we now enable that by default in the X
server.  Could you try running mathematica with the environment variable
XLIB_SKIP_ARGB_VISUALS set to 1? E.g. from a command line:

  $ XLIB_SKIP_ARGB_VISUALS=1 mathematica
Comment 3 Garrett Mitchener 2006-10-04 17:52:55 UTC 
That environment variable makes it work just fine.
Comment 4 Adam Jackson 2006-10-05 11:31:04 UTC 
Unfortunately that means it's a bug in Mathematica.  It's getting confused by
the presence of the extra Composite visual, which is what gets used for
per-pixel alpha.

Please report this bug to Wolfram.  The environment variable given above is safe
to set on all versions of X, it will simply have no effect on older Xlib or when
the server doesn't support the Composite extension.  They should at a minimum
add this to their wrapper script (if any), or better yet fix their code to
select only the visuals they really want.