Re: X affecting console text color??
On Sun, Jun 01, 2008 at 14:27:54 +0200, Sjoerd Hiemstra wrote:
> Op Sat, May 31, 2008 at 16:39:03 +0200, Florian Kulzer wrote:
> > On Fri, May 30, 2008 at 14:10:47 +0200, Sjoerd Hiemstra wrote:
> > > My console text has the default light gray color - until X is
> > > started.
> > >
> > > When going from X to the console with Ctrl-Alt-F2, the console
> > > foreground color has turned to dark gray, hardly readable on the
> > > black background.
> > > Even after logging out of X, back into the console, the console text
> > > remains dark gray.
> > > Only after restarting the computer, the default light gray text
> > > color has returned.
> > >
> > > This phenomenon started 1 or 2 weeks ago, during a lenny upgrade
> > > involving a large number of files that had 'xorg' in their names.
> > >
> > > Anyone else having this?
> > > How could X affect the default console text color?
> >
> > Maybe a bug in the video driver screws up the video mode switching.
> > Which xorg video driver are you using?
>
> The R300 driver, videocard is ATI Radeon 9500.
> But now we're moving towards the limits of my knowledge. How do I find
> out if this driver is still used, after the xorg upgrade 2 weeks ago?
Running
grep '/drivers/' /var/log/Xorg.0.log
should tell you which driver is loaded. It will probably be ati_drv.so,
which is a "smart" wrapper for all ATI cards. It should detect that your
card needs radeon_drv.so and load that one.
While you are at it, you might also want to check for warnings and error
messages with something like
egrep '^\((EE|WW)\)' /var/log/Xorg.0.log
> > You could try to downgrade to the previous version or test if the
> > vesa driver leads to the same problem.
>
> Among many others, these drivers are installed:
>
> xserver-xorg-video-ati
> xserver-xorg-video-vesa
Both ati_drv.so and radeon_drv.so are in xserver-xorg-video-ati, so you
could try to downgrade to the previous version of that package (found in
your package cache or at snapshot.debian.net).
> How to switch to the vesa driver?
Put
Driver "vesa"
into the "Device" section of your xorg.conf. The vesa driver does not
have proper hardware acceleration, so you will probably not want to use
it permanently. This is just meant as a test to see if the ati/radeon
module is indeed the source of your problem.
To further test the ati/radeon driver, you can run
tail -fn0 /var/log/Xorg.0.log
in an X terminal, then switch to a console, switch back to X and check
the messages. Maybe something helpful, or at least google-friendly,
comes up.
Also check the BTS. A quick glance shows at least 4 bugs related to VT
switching (#435040, #472108, #470925, #482696). Maybe your problem is
related to one of them.
[...]
(I did not notice anything unusual in either version of xorg.conf.)
> E.g. 'setterm -foreground green' gives a very faint green text color,
> hardly readable, and only from a certain viewing angle on the tft
> screen. Same with the other colors.
> Commands like 'setterm -default' or 'setterm -reset' do not make any
> difference.
> Apparently, these settings have nothing to do with it.
I think that this also suggests a problem with the graphics driver, for
example wrong configuration of the screen brightness/backlight.
--
Regards, | http://users.icfo.es/Florian.Kulzer
Florian |
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