A number of times in the past, I have seen messages here from people who
have quit/shutdown X only to have their consoles show garbage afterwards.
I have sort of half payed attention, while quietly knocking on wood that
it doesn't happen when I shutdown X. Well, as you have no doubt guessed,
it has happened to me.
Here's my setup: SuSE Linux 5.3, XFree 3.3.2 (according to the man page),
generic video card with S3 Virge/DX chipset, XF86_SVGA X server running
in 8 bit PseudoColor mode, kernel 2.0.36, gpm active on the console (at
the time; see below for more), fvwm2 window manager.
Earlier today, I was playing xpat2, a set of solitaire games. I quit
xpat2 and then shutdown X using the menu SuSE configures as standard with
fvwm2 (under the left mouse button). X existed as it usually does,
giving a message about a broken pipe, but on the console seemingly random
letters were replaced by numbers. For example, S is 3, r is 2, t is 4,
although not all letters are replaced. Oddly, 2's are still 2's and 4's
are still 4's. Thinking it might just be a console thing, I logged out
and then logged back in again. No difference. I switched to the console
I had running where I was logged in as root. Same thing. I went back to
the console where I was logged in as myself and started X again. No
problem there; all the letters were as they should be. I shut X down
again and started it in the root console. No problem there either. I
have also given the 'reset' command, but that doesn't appear to have any
effect.
Remembering that sometimes gpm can cause problems with X, I killed gpm.
Now X won't restart, and restarting gpm doesn't help X start either. I
have piped a couple of commands through to lpr to see if the problem went
further, but the printout is normal.
Could you all offer some suggestions for fixing this? I would reboot,
but I am concerned that doing so would somehow turn a big annoyance into
a catastrophic failure. Since it affects all the consoles, even the
respawning mingetty's, it has to be a failure in something they all read
when starting. Where do the mingetty's get their character set
information from when they spawn?
Best regards,
Sean
T. Sean (Theo) Schulze
[EMAIL PROTECTED] [EMAIL PROTECTED]
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