I downloaded the Kubunutu 13.10 64-bit installer and made a bootable USB stick.

I want to install Kubuntu on a fresh partition on my Mac Pro 1,1 which is currently running Xubuntu 13.10 (as well as Mac OS X). I had to do the install by booting the installer on my newer Macbook, since the Mac Pro will not boot Ubuntu disks or USB sticks (something about EFI or some such).

So I booted the installer on the Macbook, and installed into the new partition on Mac Pro via Firewire Target Disk mode. The install succeeded, and I am able to boot into Kubuntu on Mac Pro. But the display is wonky, perhaps because it was installed from a different machine with a different monitor(?).

The login screen looks fine, and some of the "desktop" (forgive my terminology; I'm new to KDE) such as the "Desktop" button in the upper right corner of the screen is OK. But the panel along the bottom of the screen is completely trashed, as are any menus and popups. I can hack around and launch Konsole and Dolphin and they display normally, but parts of the windows get blanked out randomly.

I managed to launch bin/systemsettings and looked at the Display and Monitors setting. It shows the proper display resolution.

How can I straighten this problem out?

EDIT:

I tried Plan B, installing the kubuntu-full package into my working Xubuntu partition. Kubuntu has the same display problems. Xubuntu continues to work fine.

Try disabling compositing by pressing Alt + Shift + F12. If this causes the graphical corruption glitches to go away, then you might want to install the appropriate drivers for your system if it uses a Nvidia / ATI card/chip as they will likely work much better - and shouldn't experience this graphical distortion you are reporting.