Re: '8' character displays incorrectly on console
On Monday 05 April 2004 02:33 am, Nicholas Pattison wrote:
> I have an interesting issue on my recent install of Debian. There
> are a few quirks, but the one that is getting a bit annoying is when
> the console trys to display an '8'. About half the time, it will
> display fine, and look like and 8. About the other half, it will
> look like a lowercase 'o' (the top half appears to be missing). As
> I'm pretty much clueless as to what this could be. Everything
> displays fine in X, but not the console. When it displays correctly
> in one console, it works in all consoles. When it displays
> incorrecly in one console, it displays incorrectly in all. It will
> also magically go back and forth between displaying characters
> correctly and incorrectly. I have found no specific pattern that
> recreates this issue. This happens on both the 2.6.3 and 2.6.4
> kernel.
This sounds very much like flaky hardware. In console mode, fonts are
rendered by your video card. The fonts are rendered from a table in
hardware, ROM, or RAM. Since it changes over time and doesn't get
worse, it appears that the "source" is good - the 8 couldn't heal
otherwise. It doesn't matter if the source is ROM or RAM. It appears
to be when the graphics chip is accessing that particular area of the
lookup table that it gets all zeros instead of a pattern.
Try freeze spray on various parts of the card to see if you can make the
problem appear or disappear.
--
Rob
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