Hey -

I just installed from scratch Fedora Core 4.
Almost everything is great!
However, as useful as X is, there are a lot of things I just prefer
to do with the console, and as I was going to do one of these
aformentioned things, by hitting CTRL+ALT+F1, the screen
changes as it normally would, but the picture is garbled, many
different colored horizontal lines, and no hope for logging in.

Any ideas on what to do to fix this??

Thanks!

Well, temporarily (as a workaround), can't you just use a terminal emulator provided with your Desktop Environment (Konsole, gnome-terminal, screen, xterm, rxvt, multi-gnome-terminal, aterm, eterm, etc)?

As for what's the problem with your getty terminals, sounds like a video driver problem. I've heard that both nVidia users with certain driver revisions, and many ATI users have had corruption issues when switching to a console from X and back (I'm an ATI user, but I don't have that problem; it seems system-related in some way, but since I don't have the issue, I've not investigated).

What video card do you have, and what drivers do you use for it? If proprietary, what revision of the drivers?

Also, you mention a "garbled picture" and "colored horizontal lines" in the console. This suggests you have a framebuffer graphic as background for your console display (bootsplash or fbsplash), as the console is normally black. Perhaps there is a problem with your bootloader settings (where the framebuffer parameters are normally set)?