[lug] bad refresh going back to text mode from X on laptop.

[Brian Jarrett]

Thanks for the tips, guys.  I tried knoppix as was suggested earlier, and there was no difference in the behavior.

I'm not an expert on it, but I believe Mandrake (at least) by default uses a framebuffer.  My LILO bootloader gives me the options of "linux" or "linux-nonfb" and when I get to the login with just "linux" (runlevel 3) I get a text screen with a graphical background that has "9.2" in transparent white at the lower-right corner.  I also tried loading with "linux non-fb", logged in, ran "startx" and then logged out of the kde session and got the same problem.  So even without using the framebuffer on startup, I can't get out of my X session with a readable console.

I'm not familiar with how to launch items on shutdown of X.  I've been using "startx" to launch my X session.  I also tried just running "kde" and got slightly different results when leaving the X session.  The screen went black and out of sync again, but when I hit "ctrl-alt-del" to reboot, the background appeared to switch to blue as it went through shutdown and then the machine rebooted.  Could it have switched back to a framebuffer for shutdown?

I guess I'll try looking into how the framebuffer is launched and what can be done on startup and shutdown of an X session.  I've never delved into this before.

It seems odd to me that this sort of problem isn't already documented somewhere.  I would think it would happen quite often on laptops.

Brian

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Jason Strnad [mailto:jstrnad at mac.com]
> Sent: Wednesday, November 26, 2003 6:43 AM
> To: lug at lug.boulder.co.us
> Subject: Re: [lug] bad refresh going back to text mode from X 
> on laptop.
> 
> 
> Do you use the framebuffer for textmode before you load X? 
> You may try 
> using it, and setting up X to invoke a short script which resets your 
> framebuffer to a known working mode.  Try playing with the console fb 
> options and settings to get something that works for you, then stick 
> those settings in a script that is run as X exits.
> 
> -Jason
> 
> On Nov 25, 2003, at 10:20 AM, Brian Jarrett wrote:
> 
> > Hello,
> >
> > I have a problem after shutting down X on my laptop.  The text mode 
> > refresh rate must get reset to something bad so I can't 
> read anything 
> > in text mode.  I just have to CTRL-ALT-DEL and wait for it 
> to reboot.  
> > I have my laptop startup in runlevel 3, so I know it's capable.
> >
> > I've got a MicroPro laptop made by UniWill (almost identical to the 
> > N351S4) that has an NVidia GeForce 440 64Mb video card.  
> The display 
> > is capable of 1400x1050 (this is what I have X running).  
> Right now I 
> > have Mandrake 9.2 on it, but I've also had Gentoo 1.4 and Krud 9 
> > installed, and nothing has worked.
> >
> > Is this a display driver problem, or is there something 
> else I can set 
> > to prevent this?  I've seen some discussions on using 
> fbset, but I get 
> > ioctrl errors and I've also seen some mention of SVGATextMode.
> >
> > Can anyone point me in the proper direction?
> >
> > Thanks,
> > Brian
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