Bug 215762 – Display error on all text in games-action/extreme-tuxracer-4.0

• Product: Gentoo Linux
• Status: RESOLVED WORKSFORME

[Description Björn Stein 2008-04-01 19:44:10 UTC]

games-action/extreme-tuxracer-4.0 renders all menu texts merely one pixel tall, making it illegible and the games (almost) unplayable.

The same bug seems to have been fixed in Ubuntu (https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/mesa/+bug/99158).
So how can we replicate this fix in gentoo linux?

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1. # emerge extreme-tuxracer
2. # etracer
3. observe screen

Actual Results:  
Menu (three lines of yellow text) is displayed only as three single pixel row, illegibly. Same effect is seen on all text in the game.

Expected Results:  
Legible, yellow text should be displayed.

Dell Latitude D600, xorg-x11-7.2 with radeon driver,
same problem occurs with games-arcade/ppracer-0.3.1,
link given in description (to corrsponding ubuntoo bug)
suggests that the actual culprit might be some kind of GL library, not this game.

[Comment 1 Björn Stein 2008-04-01 19:45:52 UTC]

Created attachment 147994 [details]
xorg.conf configuration file

[Comment 2 Mr. Bones. (RETIRED) 2008-04-01 20:05:10 UTC]

seems like a driver bug.

[Comment 3 Tomáš Chvátal (RETIRED) 2008-04-02 21:41:32 UTC]

a) you have wrongly configured your ga in xorg.conf
there is no EAX its EXA :]
b) this is really driver related, try to update your driver onto testing 6.8.0
c) try not to use xinerama but xrandr extension (try search gentoo-wiki on this)

[Comment 4 Björn Stein 2008-04-04 07:42:05 UTC]

(In reply to comment #3)

Thanks for the help!

> a) you have wrongly configured your ga in xorg.conf
> there is no EAX its EXA :]
> b) this is really driver related, try to update your driver onto testing 6.8.0

a) and b) (now using x11-drivers/xf86-video-ati-6.8.0) have not changed anything.

> c) try not to use xinerama but xrandr extension (try search gentoo-wiki on
> this)

I'll try c) as soon as I've figured out how to change xorg.conf to enable xrandr . Would it help to try with a single monitor setup instead for now, if the main idea is just to disable xinerama?

Also on my todo list is switching to ati-drivers to see if the bug occurs there, too.

BTW, I do remember that a (very) early version of tuxracer (long before it even became ppracer) worked, but already later versions did not. It is possible that this concurred with me switching from ati-drivers to the open source ones, or maybe to modular X, but I am not sure.

[Comment 5 Tomáš Chvátal (RETIRED) 2008-04-04 08:15:51 UTC]

mhm,
i guess you have old mesa (not really old in terms of gentoo [its stable]) try using ~x86 mesa and mesa-progs

[Comment 6 Tomáš Chvátal (RETIRED) 2008-04-04 08:17:10 UTC]

do not mess with both gl implementations, it could break some stuff in your system (ie qt bindings) so for testing ok but long term use don't keep both ati-drivers and xf86-drivers-ati on your gentoo.

[Comment 7 Björn Stein 2008-04-04 20:42:08 UTC]

Using Mesa 7.0.2 fixes this bug (even without having reemerged xorg-server without  nptl use flags, as mesa-progs advises to do), or at least it does in this combination:

media-libs/mesa-7.0.2               (~x86)
x11-apps/mesa-progs-7.0.1           (~x86)
xorg-x11-7.2
xorg-server-1.3.0.0-rc5
x11-drivers/xf86-video-ati-6.8.0    (~x86)

So with this, I've changed this bug's status to "worksforme".

Thanks also for warning me against keeping both drivers around -- apparently, I had, and did occasionally experience a need to recompile qt libraries and dependent packages. So hopefully I can avoid that in the future ;-)

[Comment 8 Björn Stein 2008-04-04 20:44:55 UTC]

I just noticed the most embarrassing typo:

I meant to report this bug for version 0.4, not the (not as of yet existing) version 4.0 of extreme-tuxracer; the first word in my bug report should have been:

games-action/extreme-tuxracer-0.4