[ale] Weirdness with display

[James P. Kinney III]

Hey all,
I just started to have a bizarre crashing problem. I hit ctl-alt-f1 and
the cursor was a HUGE multi-colored blinking block. The text on the
screen was normal. So I hit alt-f7 to pop back to X and shutdown
everything. No go. Block vanishes, but no X screen appears. I hit
ctl-alt-del and see nothing on the screen, but the hard drive light
spases out and the box reboot. Same kernel I've been using for a week or
so,  2.4.17-xfs (XFS journaling extensions from SGI) with the nvidia and
svga framebuffers. All looks good during the boot up. As the gdm screen
begins to appear, a large multi-colored box shows up and persistes
throughout the login process. It is on top of every virtual screen. I
log out of gnome and hit ctl-alt-bksp at the gdm login screen. X
promptly dies and when it comes back, no big ugly box! So I hit
ctl-alt-f1 and big ugly box cursor is back. Again try to return to f7 X
screen and the video locks up. Reboot. No big block. X starts. Big ugly
block. AARRGGHH!!

This same kernel has been booted multiple time over the past week
clearing up a usb problem. I've not seen anything like it before. Syslog
shows no signs of kernel weirdness.

What does it look like? I can capture it with a screen shot! I tried to
view the screen shot I took and it's NOT THERE!!! So it's got to be a
hardware artifact.

Comments, suggestions, solutions, quips about nvidia tnt2 cards...
-- 
James P. Kinney III   \Changing the mobile computing world/
President and COO      \          one Linux user         /
Local Net Solutions,LLC \           at a time.          /
770-493-8244             \.___________________________./

GPG ID: 829C6CA7 James P. Kinney III (M.S. Physics)
<jkinney at localnetsolutions.com>
Fingerprint = 3C9E 6366 54FC A3FE BA4D 0659 6190 ADC3 829C 6CA7 



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