Created attachment 31479 [details] Screenshot of the problematic font rendering After having upgraded the xorg and xf86 packages on my Arch Linux I started to notice severe problems with font rendering. After starting X server everything looks normal but after a bit of interaction (browsing, typing, etc...) the font rendering starts degrading. The characters seem to have bits chipped away and this gets worse and worse down to a point where no text is recognizable anymore. It occurs in all text displayed on the screen. Some icons, like the back, forward, reload, etc.. on firefox are also affected. (see attached screenshot) I have tried Gnome, XFCE and KDE and all have displayed this problem. I have realized that playing with the "Font rendering details" in Gnome, i.e., Smoothing, Hinting and Subpixel order seems to temporarily relieve the problem but this is temporary only for the distortions come back as the user keeps interacting. Noticeably, none of the combinations of settings I've tried, and I believe I have tried most of them, was able to solve this problem. Downgrading to version 7.4 has solved the problem. I have installed the drivers ATI and Vesa. My graphics card it: ATI Technologies Inc Radeon RV250 [Mobility FireGL 9000] (rev 02)
Are you still experincing this? What did you actually change to fix the problem when you downgraded to "7.4"? The katamari release numbers don't actually mean much as they're just a collection of other packages. If you can tell us exactly which package change fixed it for you (ie, radeon driver, xorg-server, etc) that would help. Short of that, I'm assuming this is a radeon dri bug based on the screenshot. Try installing a newer version of mesa. If you still have issues, try using the mesa dri driver or swrast instead of radeon gallium.
I am not sure anymore about how this problem got solved. As I remember, eventually I down graded an awful amount of packages, waited for a few months and then let them upgrade to newer versions and it worked. I am actually using Ubuntu since a few months now and haven't had that problem again ever since.
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