Xfce Forum

xtrailrunner

Member

Registered: 2015-01-10

Posts: 2

Text is disappearing/appearing in applications

Hello,
after using Mint 16 with XFCE for a while yesterday I installed Mint 17.1 with XFCE. Because I had some strange effects in the XFCE terminal (lines are marked by a light background) I wanted to install the XFCE theme manager using synaptic. Here I found that lines with package names are not visible. When moving the mouse over the area package names become visible for a short moment. I also cannot check boxes. I have tried to change colors and themes but without success.
The PC is a bit old with a nVIDIA nForce2 card but with the previous version this all worked without problems.
At the moment I don't know how to proceed.
Any help is appreciated.

Kind regards
Juergen

Sideburns

Member

From: Trinidad, CO

Registered: 2011-03-30

Posts: 467

Website

Re: Text is disappearing/appearing in applications

I don't want to point fingers, but have you checked the Mint support forums to see if anybody else is reporting similar issues?  Also, are you using the OSS nouveau driver for your card or the binary blob from nVidia, because it may make a difference.  Right now, there's not enough information for us to go on, so I'm trying to help you narrow things down.

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MountainDewManiac

Member

From: Where Mr. Bankruptcy is Prez

Registered: 2013-03-24

Posts: 1,115

Re: Text is disappearing/appearing in applications

Was this a separate installation from 16, or did you somehow upgrade 16 to 17.1? Seems like up until Mint 17, the official recommendation - repeated many, many times - was not to upgrade from one version to another because it could cause various problems. (With version 17, Clem decided to pull a Debian (so to speak) and freeze versions of some things. In this case, by basing 17.1 (and, presumably 17.2, 17.3, et cetera for however long Ubuntu 14.04 (LTS) is supported by Ubuntu, if I understand correctly) on Ubuntu 14.04 instead of switching the base to 14.10. Therefore, it is supposed to be safe to update Mint 17 to 17.1 and, in fact, there is now an option to do so in the mintUpdate 4.8.0 menu.)

Regards,
MDM

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Mountain Dew Maniac

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MountainDewManiac

Member

From: Where Mr. Bankruptcy is Prez

Registered: 2013-03-24

Posts: 1,115

Re: Text is disappearing/appearing in applications

have you checked the Mint support forums to see if anybody else is reporting similar issues?

That is a good idea, especially since I'm guessing that what xtrailrunner actually installed was the RC for Mint 17.1 XFCE - apparently, the "release" version of it was only approved yesterday and does not appear to have been posted publicly yet. (They could be one and the same, though.)

As the number of XFCE users make up only a fraction of the total number of Mint users, and as the number of people who've downloaded/installed the RC of Mint 17.1 XFCE would (I assume) comprise only a portion of that total, it becomes even more important to report any issues that you have found. All the developers can do is to see how it works on their hardware. (That would be true for any version of any OS/distro.)

Also, are you using the OSS nouveau driver for your card or the binary blob from nVidia, because it may make a difference.

Another good point.

Something else that might (IDK) be a consideration is that this version of Mint XFCE ships with two window managers - Xfwm and Compiz. Which one are you using?

Right now, there's not enough information for us to go on, so I'm trying to help you narrow things down.

Speaking of a lack of information, is this the 32- or 64-bit version of Mint? After you downloaded the .ISO, did you ensure that you had a bit-for-bit copy of the original by checking the md5 checksum of the file? Assuming that you actually meant that you installed the RC (release candidate) of Mint 17.1, it should be:

4b5c0c3ef5e0a609545e1f222fd3c754 (32-bit)
OR
a2d76f8b7e56e05852607758ed537ce3 (64-bit)

It is not unheard of for an .ISO that is not a bit-for-bit match to be installable and then the installed system evidence odd "gremlins" afterwards.

Regards,
MDM

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Mountain Dew Maniac

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xtrailrunner

Member

Registered: 2015-01-10

Posts: 2

Re: Text is disappearing/appearing in applications

Thanks for a lot of useful tipps. I'll try to clarify things:
- The install was a fresh install of Mint 17 (sorry for the wrong info in the original post) with Xfce on a 32-bit system. Still no changes in the configuration.
- Before there was Mint 16 with XFCE installed on the system. It ran fine without any modifications. I didn't want to upgrade and decided for a fresh install.
- The window manager seems to be xfwm (There is a process xfwm4 running).
- I have tried to install additional drivers for the graphics card but can't see anything in the GUI window for the driver install.
- I installed from the same source (DVD) Mint/XFCE on a Toshiba laptop some weeks ago. There were no similar problems.

I have searched in the forums before but it is difficult to describe the symptoms in adequate search terms.
For example when I enter and submit a command in the XFCE terminal the following is happen:
The background becomes light grey (same as desktop, i.e. transparent) and the font becomes white which is difficult to read.
When I move the terminal window around the background switches to black and the font to white which is good readable.

What is your recommendation:
Shall I upgrade to 17.1 to see what happens ?
The upgrade is still not offered in the upgrade manager today.

Thanks for your support.
Juergen