Mark Knecht wrote:
After X has started, the text screens tty1...6 become "weird". The characters are much too big, look distorted and "blink". I think there's something wrong with the text mode. The screens stay so even when shutting down X or rebooting.
I have seen this problem with one of my low-end ATI cards. I don't think it's an XFree problem, per se, but maybe I'm wrong. This is caused by certain charaters which are sent to the console switching the card into an extended character set.
Anyway, so if it isn't a specific app like it was in my case.
Hi Mark,
I get this problem just right after starting X. I don't start any program, it's just there when I switch back immediately to console pressing Ctrl-Alt-F[1..6].
It's definitely a nVidia driver problem (I thought), because with Mandrake's default nv driver all is fine (but no 3D or OpenGL).
But now you're saying you got this problem with ATI too...
My 'problem', if you want to call it that is that for very old, DOS type backward compatibiity, there are other character sets in VGA cards. These sets can be enabled at the command line. When any application, be it X itself, or someother app, sends a certain escape sequence to the console then the character set gets enabled.
In my corrupted console, if I type
echo -e "\xF"
then the character set is switched back and everythign from there on is fine. If I type
echo -e "\xE"
then I get the 'failure' mode.
I do not use any sort of graphical login manager. I boot to the command line and then start fluxbox via .xinitrc. I can therefore switch back and test this stuff out.
You might it as I do, or you might try logging into another console and seeing if you can purposely 'corrupt' the fonts in the same way.
Again, if it's what I deal with then it's not a 'failure', per se, but actually the hardware is doing what it's supposed to when it receives these escape sequences.
Good luck, Mark _______________________________________________ XFree86 mailing list XFree86@xxxxxxxxxxx http://XFree86.Org/mailman/listinfo/xfree86
