[ale] Alt+Ctrl+F# blank screens

[Michael Trausch]

2009/12/29 Björn Gustafsson <bg-ale at bjorng.net>:
> On Tue, Dec 29, 2009 at 12:15 PM, Gray Frost <grayf327 at gmail.com> wrote:
>>  One thing that
>> can see is that my monitor1 (my 46 inch LCD TV) shows a shadow of a
>> 4:3 box and switches to 1280x1024 res like it is attempting to show
>> something while my
>> monitor0 (22 inch LCD) shows the "Check source and Connection"
>> message.  That cant be good :(
>
> To me that sounds like it is trying to display the text terminal on
> your TV (and failing).  I haven't experienced this exact problem
> myself, but I imagine that maybe you can tweak (or rewire) something
> to swap the priority of your TV and 22" LCD to make the LCD "primary".
>  (The symptom you recount makes me think that the video card is trying
> to drive both monitors at a non-viable rate -- perhaps because the TV
> is reporting its modes incorrectly, as Michael suggested.)

I do know of one particular card (a GeForce 8100) that once the NVIDIA
driver puts it in graphics mode for X11 won't go back to text/console
mode at all (the screen is a bunch of randomly-colored, random
characters, reminiscent of very old programs that would crash when
directly accessing the video display buffer and would fill the screen
up with random bytes including random attributes, some things blinking
and so forth).  It is probably some sort of driver bug.

One other one that I know of, that I replaced with an add-in PCI-E
NVIDIA card, would occasionally (and sometimes, more than
occasionally) hard-lockup the entire system.  I was never able to
fully figure out what was going on there, but it had appeared to
generate some sort of heavy interrupt storm and I'd lose control of
everything from the NIC to the keyboard and mouse, and the only way to
get back to a sane state would be to press the reset button on the
front of the case.  Not good.  I don't suspect that was a driver
problem, though, because it would happen no matter what the driver, no
matter what the operating system, and so I suspected that it was
probably the chipset itself doing something nasty (hence why I
replaced it).  I was offered two choices when I replaced it; I went
with the NVIDIA over the ATI (though the acquisition of this laptop is
making me question the validity of that decision).

>>> If I default back to a single
>>>  monitor then my Alt +Ctrl+F# X sessions work fine..
>
> Have you tried a single-monitor configuration with just the TV?  If
> console screens did work with that configuration, that pretty much
> rules out my idea.

The single-monitor console-only configuration (without a framebuffer)
should work just fine, since that's (usually) the mode that the
operating system is started in.  If anything, once X starts, I've
learned that all bets are off; the graphics card may not work again
outside of X if the driver is buggy and fails to reset the card
properly.

    --- Mike