Linux console bug(s) (?)

[zini@mail.asianet.it (Zini Enrico)]

System: Hamm, SVGATextMode (Screen set to 112x40) on a STB Velocity 3D, 12
        virtual consoles (mingetty).

I've set my Linux box to use 12 virtual consoles and I'm experiencing since a
long time (Debian 1.3, 1.2 and 1.1) some weird behaviours:

1) From tty10 on Midnight Commander behaves as on a dumb terminal (e.g. ^O
   doesn't switch to what's behind the panels but to a black screen)

2) When I use Midnight Commander on higher consoles (I still haven't been able
   to determine which ones but I can suppose from tty10 on) it occasionally
   happens that the first tty's (tty1 to around tty4) display an old screenshot
   (e.g. I run vi on tty1, then I work a while with mc on higher tty's, switch
   to tty1, quit vi and clear the screen; then I go back working with mc,
   switch back to tty1 and see again my old file in vi. ^L and it's bash as it
   have to be)

3) When I run Midnight Commander on tty10 (and only in tty10) I get some:

TIOCLINUX (0/8/9) ioctl is gone - use /dev/vcs

   on startup, exit and every time I use ^O, and it occasionally locks the
   entire consolle and I have to kill mc from another prompt (neither ^C nor ^\
   work)


Note: I use the lower consoles as a normal user and the higher ones as root for
system administration.

It seems to me that mc's screen save and restore routines trigger some oddity
in the console; am I the only one to experience this?

And... ehm... is it normal that if I scroll the screen line by line (e.g. with
less) while I am playing some .mp3 or some .wav on my AWE64 I hear some
clicking?

And, while I'm here, is it normal that scrolling back (pressing PageUp) in
less is much slower than scrolling up? It even quite annoying...


				Ciao! Enrico