how to reset the console?

[Rob Mahurin <alphenglor@rhct093.res.utk.edu>]

I feel pretty silly about this ...

I was playing around with some of the programs in the games directory
and one (lincity) gave me some complaint about svga permissions.  I
said Hmmm and tried it with sudo, and it got about halfway through
changing the video stuff and died.

Now I'm stuck with a half-reset console, which makes all of my text
VTs pretty much useless.  Instead of having text characters, I have
colorful blinking garbage.  The consoles all still work:  I can log
in, play sounds, etc, but I can't see them.  Interestingly, programs
that change vga settings that work (specifically, acidwarp) do so
successfully, but when they exit again they return the console to the
fubar state.

Typing "reset" doesn't help.  the man page for the console says that
it can be reset by echoing ESC c to it, but either that's not doing
anything either or I'm not doing that right (I'm blind typing "echo -e
\\033c", which clears the xterm I'm working in).

What now?  How can I (a) figure out exactly what's confused and (b)
fix it without breaking anything?  Not having to reboot would be
nice, particularly since xdm brings up its gooey screen without any
problems.  Plus, it would be nice to know what's happened when I file
my bug report.

I don't always get the digest of this list, so please Cc: replies to
robm@mad.scientist.com.

Thanks.

Rob

-- 
You will have a long and unpleasant discussion with your supervisor.