I rebooted my box today to clear out a kernel module that got itself stuck somehow and wouldn't unload. When the machine came back up the screen went blank upon SVGATextMode running.
I logged in remotely and messed with it for a bit, to no avail. My last ditch solution was to purge svgatextmode and the console-tools packages, and reinstall them. With its default configuration SVGATextMode now works, but when I change the chipset from 'VGA' to 'Riva128' (which fits my card - a Diamond Viper 330E), I get nothing on the screen. Trying different modes, I found that screen shows nothing when 8-pixel wide fonts are used, and when modes with 9-pixel wide fonts are used I get strange 'double width' fonts (think mode 2 on the old BBCs). When this happens every second letter on the screen is displayed twice, but the others aren't (hmm, bad explanation ..) .. for example, my login prompt looks like this: DDbbaa NN//iiuu oodd bbuuiinnttyy oottssaa ooii:: rather than the normal: Debian GNU/Linux woody obtusian tty1 obtusian login: (All this in the freaky double-width font). Clues? Its got me stumped. (FWIW, I tried swapping the card for another of the same type, same problem). Regards, Rob.
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