network-manager left-click menu doesn't always show in multi-head setup

I've tried to reproduce this with multiple screen resolutions and setups (to the left, to the right, above, below, etc) with no luck. I went all the way down to 800x600. This was on Natty.

Rolf, can you confirm which version of Ubuntu you're running? Thanks!

Mathieu, thank you for having a look. I am running lucid and I can still reproduce this. Maybe this is dependent o the video driver. Mathieu, are you sure you had the external display positioned above the internal one? And lots of network entries that made the menu hit the bottom of the internal display and overflow? All these conditions are necessary to trigger this bug here. I'll see if I can get a natty partition set up to see if it's still a problem there.

Oh, two more things that may or may not be necessary to trigger this bug:

* I am running UNR
* the menu bar is on the internal display

not sure if menu bar is the entirely correct bar. But it's the bar that has the notification area and the network-manager icon among others

not sure if menu bar is the entirely correct *term*. But it's the bar that has the notification area and the network-manager icon among others

Got it. Were you able to do testing in Natty after all? You may want to try it from a live CD too.

This is just to make sure in which cases this issue appears, and if it has already been fixed by various other changes we've made this cycle (then it's easier to say we have something to backport, or if it still is present and needs fixing)

I tried a natty live CD, but it was so utterly broken that I could not even log in to X. Very bad screen artifacts. I was shocked to see this so late in the release cycle.

Rolf,

Would you mind trying again? I think fallback should work much much better by now (so I expect you should have fewer problems with natty and graphics), and unfortunately I'm unable to reproduce the issues you've seen with menus..

Not sure if trying this in natty is so much help. After all, natty uses unity and not une/unr.

Can I ask you instead to try and reproduce this in a lucid system, either virtual or live CD? I think it would actually be more helpful if you were able to reproduce it in at least some settings than me not being able to reproduce it in others. I fully understand that normally the first question to ask is whether it's still a problem in the latest release. I think the setup of the latest release may have changed too much to find any meaningful information there. It's as if we were trying to diagnose a GNOME bug in KDE.

Not really, precisely because what we're trying to check is whether the issue has been fixed and it would make sense to backport changes. If this is an issue in Lucid, is this also one in Maverick?

I'll load up my system with Maverick, but I'm not sure how far I'll be able to go; I probably don't have the same hardware as you do, in terms of graphics card, and I'm not sure if I'll manage to make multiple wifi devices work in the live CD (I think the driver isn't there). However, it is worth a try.

Maverick may still be a valid test case, I suppose. I'm downloading the live CD as we speak.

As far as making the menu overflow, I had no issues getting a USB UMTS stick, wifi and ethernet to work at the same time while booted from a live CD in the past. That should probably do it (one wifi device is definitely enough, I hope we were not misunderstanding each other). I guess even wifi only without UMTS and ethernet may be enough if you are in a very busy area with lots of AP.

As far as "whether this has been fixed", that's the point I was trying to make. I'm not sure that UNE and Unity are comparable enough to draw any conclusions related to one based on findings in the other. I'm guessing a bit here. If you think that's still the case, OK.

Can you attach a screenshot of the menu overflowing correctly in natty? I'd like to have a look how it's done.

Screenshots:
 - overflowing before scrolling (with menu arrows): http://twitpic.com/4mx21y
 - overflowing after scrolling: http://twitpic.com/4mx2ca -- sorry, got this one a little quickly

In Natty in my current setup, the menu is just barely long enough to overflow if I add this USB wifi device I found. That's why I'm able to scroll a bit and remove the scroll arrows to show the full menu.

FWIW, I was able to reproduce this on Maverick; setting the laptop display to 800x600 so it's small enough to not fit the menu, with another, larger display above; the gnome-panel is on the primary, 800x600 display. The menu tries to overflow to the top display due to the bottom one being too small, but somehow doesn't draw on the top display; you only see the drop shadow over the panel.

In this case however, I think it's that GTK itself is calculating screen sizes to attempt to show the menu where it fits, but is either not able to display above (not over) gnome-panel due to limitations, or actually gets painted off-screen.

Rolf, can you please confirm whether 3D effects are enabled on your system, since it could be an issue with compiz drawing stuff on the screen. I don't think it is, as it's more likely to be something at the GTK level, but let's be sure.

I'm reassigning this to GTK and we should definitely open a bug about this upstream, in GNOME.

As for nm-applet, I really don't think it's an issue with it, since there are no changes to menu drawing processes in the patches we carry. It's a simple enough GtkMenu, it just has quite a lot of items.

Mathieu, thank you for your help in triaging this. I think I'm not even running Compiz. "ps | grep -i compiz" is empty.

Rolf,

All that will be left will be to open a bug upstream against gtk+2.0. I'll do so ASAP, unless you do it before me ;)

FWIW, I've run into another issue that I believe is a likely dupe but has very different effects so I filed it as a separate ticket for now: bug 777738

Bug has moved to https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gtk/issues/359 upstream