Re: nv driver on Samsung X15plus: scrambled consoles

[Matt Zagrabelny <mzagrabe@d.umn.edu>]

On Mon, 2005-02-21 at 20:50 +0000, Jan T. Kim wrote:
> Hi again,
> 
> in trying to solve / work around the nvidia problem described in my
> previous message, I tried the nv driver that comes with the XFree86
> distribution. The X stuff looks fine, but the consoles become totally
> messed up (a wild mess of flickering pixels) once the X server is
> started. This is for switching from X to a console using Ctrl-Alt-F[1-6],
> but even persists after shutting down X.
> 
> The system appears to be alive, though, Ctrl-Alt-Delete gives a clean
> shutdown (as much as one can tell from the wild flickering console and
> from the absence of any complaints upon the next system boot).
> 
> Is there perhaps any magic (e.g. an option to set in /etc/X11/XF86Config-4)
> to keep the consoles in a functional state?
> 

i had these same troubles with an intel video chipset. what fixed it was
using a framebuffer with the console. i chose to compile into the kernel
the necessary drivers, i imagine it would work with modules, but was
unsure if i needed to make an initrd image and didnt want to fuss.

here are the relevant lines from my .config file:

#
# Graphics support
#
CONFIG_FB=y
CONFIG_FB_VESA=y
CONFIG_VIDEO_SELECT=y

#
# Console display driver support
#
CONFIG_VGA_CONSOLE=y
CONFIG_DUMMY_CONSOLE=y
CONFIG_FRAMEBUFFER_CONSOLE=y
CONFIG_FONTS=y
CONFIG_FONT_8x16=y

#
# Logo configuration
#
CONFIG_LOGO=y
CONFIG_LOGO_LINUX_CLUT224=y

here is the relevant line from my menu.lst file for grub.

# kopt=root=/dev/hda1 ro vga=0x318 ide0=dma ide1=dma
                         ^^^^^^^^^
this is the switch for grub. (make sure you run update-grub afterwards)

-matt zagrabelny