Alternate consoles dorked

[papaschtroumpf]

If I press CTRL-ALT-F3 to bring up another console, it looks very strange, it almost looks lie "ascii art" text. I can sort of read a few huge words on the screen and see a huge blinking cursor.

I also get the same behavior if I press ESC during shutdown to see the text "behind" the shutdown screen.

 

This happened fairly recently but I'm not sure when. The most recent things I have done that could have caused this are:

- upgraded the motherboard

- installed newer NVidia drivers

- did along overdue update and picked up at least a dozen updates through the Mandrake Control Center Applet

 

Any idea? I wish I could take a screenshot.

[spiedra]

That command takes you out of a WM and puts you into the command line. Why not launch a console directly from within a WM, such as Aterm or Eterm, or KDE Shell?

[papaschtroumpf]

That command takes you out of a WM and puts you into the command line. Why not launch a console directly from within a WM, such as Aterm or Eterm, or KDE Shell?

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

 

that's not the point. why is my console suddenly broken and how do I fix it?

[bvc]

for me it's the nvidia drivers and I have to run

vga=normal splash=quiet

from the bootloader (no frambuffer)

[devries]

You use a Nvidia driver?

 

Go to /etc/lilo.conf and edit the line vga=xxx (probably 788) to vga=normal. Save and exit the file. Run lilo (as root /sbin/lilo) and reboot.

 

Good luck.

 

BVC: you beat me to it

Edited August 10, 2004 by devries