Comment 23 for bug 194769

Ok...Wife & child are out of the country, so spent Father's Day digging into this problem. To preface this post, I am *not* a hacker, but I am an engineer and have some analytical abilities. Really, though, I ain't a clue as to what I am doing.

First, I when through the XFCE archives to find the rev history of the terminal. Then I downloaded a few of the revisions and built them to see if a) did the problem always exist, and b) if not, when did start.

It turns out that while 0.2.5.8rc2 from xfce-4.3.99.2 (released 5-nov-06) does *not* have the problem, 0.2.6 from xfce-4.4.0 (released 21-jan-07) does have the problem.

I ran a diff on the two source trees (attached) and found that there are 13 occurrences in some of the source files in 0.2.6 that have the following sequence of code:

#if GTK_CHECK_VERSION(2,10,0) ....some code .... #endif

It seems that building against GTK 2.10 (or later?) adds some additional code for compositing (this was my original suspicion).

As a test, I when through each file of 0.2.6 and changed the code (*please*, someone teach me how to use sed!) so the #if test would always fail, recompiled, and, lo and behold, the problem dissappeared!

I have not tried this with 0.2.8 yet, that is next on my list. But the problem definitely seems to be related to window transparencies.

I think there are two possibilities:

#1) There is a problem with the GTK library with respect to the MediaMagic graphic controllers. This seems most likely, as we are the only ones experience the problem;

#2) There is a problem with the way the terminal code calls the GTK library with respect to compositing, and only the MediaMagic hardware is sensitive to it. This does not seem likely.

This shouldn't be too hard for a decent hacker, there are only about 20-30 lines of code in question. Any way to kick this to the GTK guys?

I will continue my investigation to see if I can come up with anything else.