Window manager problems

[Rick Stevens]

On 01/01/2015 01:47 PM, Tethys wrote:
> I had an old machine running some ancient version of Fedora (13 or
> something, I think). All was good. But obviously obsolete and probably
> insecure. So I upgraded to Fedora 20 before Christmas. I typically use
> fvwm. However, when I move windows, an image of the window in its
> previous position remains. See the following screenshot:
>
> http://pics.astradyne.co.uk/ref/150101--fvwm.png
>
> Note that there is only one terminal open here. The rest are ghost
> images. It doesn't do this if I use GNOME or KDE. I initially thought
> that it might be an fvwm problem. But I can replicate it using icewm
> as well. There are two ways to start the window manager - via the
> session type dropdown box, or via a user script (~/.Xclients). Playing
> around with a few options, I get the following results:
>
> Starting from session dropdown:
>
> fvwm - broken
> icewm - working
> KDE - working
> GNOME - working
> XFCE - working
>
> Starting from ~/.Xclients:
>
> fvwm - broken
> icewm - broken
> xfwm4 - broken
> mutter - working
> kwin - working
>
> This is with Intel graphics:
>
> macbeth:~# lspci | fgrep VGA
> 00:02.0 VGA compatible controller: Intel Corporation 4 Series Chipset
> Integrated Graphics Controller (rev 03)
>
> I tried compiling a new version of fvwm from source, but that showed
> the same problem. icewm and xfwm4 are intriguing in that they're
> broken from ~/.Xclients but working from the session dropdown. Any
> ideas?

That smells like an artifact of the graphics driver not redrawing the
backing store.

A lot of things have changed since F13. First, see if you have an 
/etc/X11/xorg.conf file. If so, rename it to something else and reboot.
If you did an upgrade rather than a "purge and install new" (although
going from F13 to F20 via upgrades would have taken longer than a fresh
install), you may have some crumbs left over from the F13 installation.
Starting X without an xorg.conf file may solve a number of issues.

Check the /var/log/Xorg.0.log file and verify that the Intel driver is
loading and not something else such as "vesa" or something.
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- Rick Stevens, Systems Engineer, AllDigital    ricks at alldigital.com -
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-          Consciousness: that annoying time between naps.           -
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