I have rectangular black dots in the top left corner of my screen. They blink on and off periodically, and sometimes they turn white. However, they never go away for more than around 3 seconds. Here’s a screenshot where you can distinctly see the scattered rectangular marks in the top left corner of the screen.
Try to disable boot splash (boot - Can I disable the Ubuntu splashscreen? - Ask Ubuntu) or switch to text console and back to desktop (ctrl-alt-f1 and ctrl-alt-f7). But it is bad solution! Users realy need bootsplash. I hope this will be fixed in nvidia drivers, it is bad when simple splash program cause such problems.
2 Sandip:
I don’t think that it is hardware or connection problem, you can find more details in my post (see link above).
Hi Vandalf,
I’m not sure this is a problem of nvidia drivers. After the latest package updating (Ubuntu 12.04), my computer has gotten the same problem. I’ve spent a lot of time trying to find out the cause, without success. However, I’ve observed that after login, if I close the open session and login again, the problem disappears.
Why?, if the nvidia drivers are the same. Could you test this behaviour in your computer?
I have the same behavior, but I still think that it is driver problem. I think that well known black dots is the result of video memory contents or previous video mode switching of bootsplash (plymouth). This is not fatal system fault, so the driver must properly handle such problems. When I switch video card to Intel GPU on my notebook this problem disappears, so is is likely software driver problem.
Yesterday I solved the problem ;-D.
Firstly I tried downgrading the nvidia drivers to the previous version (295.40) because my computer had been perfectly working until last week, with this version. It didn’t work: the problem continued there.
Secondly, I decided to upgrade to the latest nvidia drivers (304.88) again: no success.
At the end, I executed “Repair broken packages” in “Recovery mode”. After it, I restarted my computer and “voilà”: the problem disappeared.
Are you sure that after recovery you have nvidia driver and not open source nouveau driver? And do you have now graphical boot splash (plymouth) enabled?
I am having the same issue. More than a bit annoying. The little black (and two white) specks pop up in the upper left quadrant of my screen upon booting up and every time a new program or browser window is opened, pretty much any time I click the mouse. Sometimes they go away if I don’t click for a while but often they don’t. These little buggers are THE blemish of my system.
I am running Ubuntu 12.04 LTS on an Asus G55VW with an Intel Core i7-3610QM CPU and NVIDIA GeForce GTX 660M 2GB GDDR5.
The problem may have started after I used Super Boot Manager to change the plymouth. Since, I have uninstalled SBM, updated everything. Still got the ever-present speckled egg, though. Please help!
Update: I downloaded the Intel driver and tried to install the package but I get an error message:
Dependency is not satisfiable: libglib2.0-0 (>=2.35.9)
Unfortunately the solution will not be as simple as downloading the file and double-clicking on it. :(
I unable get graphical boot splash (Plymouth) using recommended kernel parameters. And of course there is no black dots artifacts in such case. But it is bad solution because many people need smooth boot process with graphical splash screen, especially for linux distributions targeted for industrial devices such as kiosks, cash desks, etc. Black boot screen with text kernel messages looks terrible and unprofessional.