Corrupted layouts on Qt4/Kde4 applications using Qt-4.5 on Intel graphics

March 10, 2009 · Posted in Gentoo · 9 Comments

Qt-4.5 upgrade on my laptop wasn’t that smooth. Every qt4/kde4 application had a corrupted layout and fonts were unreadable.

The fact that I didnt have such issues on any other machine made me think that there was something seriously wrong with my laptop.
KDE+QT were compile with the same CFLAGS+USE flags on every machine and he kde+qt4 versions were exactly the same. So, I figured out that it has to be something related to graphics card ( or drivers ).

KDE4 ( with qt-4.5 ) was running smoothly on every pc with Nvidia graphics card. But my laptop has Intel graphics chipset and Qt-4.5 sucked big time.

This is my hardware

0:02.0 VGA compatible controller: Intel Corporation Mobile GM965/GL960 Integrated Graphics Controller (rev 03)
00:02.1 Display controller: Intel Corporation Mobile GM965/GL960 Integrated Graphics Controller (rev 03)

So , after some googling , I did the below changes

1) Xorg.conf

Added the following on Device Section

Option “DRI” “true”
Option “AccelMethod” “XAA”
Option “XAANoOffscreenPixmaps” “True”
Option “XaaNoPixmapCache”

2) .bashrc
Added the following on my bashrc file

export INTEL_BATCH=1

Since then, my kde4 runs perfectly with Qt-4.5 . No corrupted layouts or unreadable fonts anymore , plus it is so much faster.

So, give it a try if you are having a hard time with Qt-4.5 + Intel graphics card

Tags: Gentoo, intel, qt-4.5

Qt-4.5.0 on Gentoo portage tree

March 5, 2009 · Posted in Gentoo · 7 Comments

Finally Qt-4.5.0 is out. Ben pushed it yesterday on portage tree. Qt-creator-1.0.0 version is out and on tree as well :) .

For those who havent yet moved to qt-4.5 series, I strongly recommend to read my previous blog post about Qt upgrade.

However, I want to give you some extra hints.

Raster use flag: So far this flag seems to do more damage than I originally thought . So if you have qt-gui compiled with this flag and you experience weird behavior on Qt/Kde4 apps , the first thing you have to do, before feeling a bug report, is to disable raster use flag.

Broken KDE4 apps: About a month ago ,we decided to bring qt-4.5.0_rc1 on tree . This decision annoyed some of our users and blame us for not masking qt-4.5.0_rc1. On the other hand, having more and more users using qt-4.5.0_rc1 , lead to find and fix many bugs concerning kde4 apps + Qt-4.5. We ( as Gentoo users+devs ) reported many of them on kde bugzilla and kde devs fixed them quite quickly. Some of them are still unresolved but kde upstream is aware of them so they should fix them on trunk soon and we will back port the patches on current kde4 packages as well.

So , I would like to thank our users for doing a GREAT work on our bugzilla by filling many bugs, providing patches, reporting upstream bugs and giving us a lot of feedback about kde4+Qt-4.5 cooperation.

Keep up the good work fellows and we will do our best as well.

So , happy emerging your shiny new Qt-4.5 packages :)

Tags: Gentoo, qt