VT Switching with XFree86 4.3 on Thinkpad600x
 

For over a year and a half, I happily ran Redhat 8 on my Thinkpad 600x, but, with the recent decision to migrate the workstation distro of redhat to fedora I switched to slackware 9.1. I am overall fairly happy, but, have found a peculiar bug with XFree86 4.3. I login to a terminal, and execute startx, X comes up fine, and performs well. However, if I switch to a VT (virtual terminal), and then attempt to switch back to X, the switch occurs, but the contrast/brightness are drastically reduced. After the switch, though X appears to still be running just fine (clients still respond properly, and with squinting everything works), but the dim screen is relatively unusable. I've also had issues with getting X to resume properly after an APM suspend, but that may be entirely unrelated. I tried using my old XF86Config file from my redhat 8 install, but switching to a VT traps the screen in blackness with a blinking cursor, accepting no input, which requires a reboot, and is definitely worse. The only significant graphics difference is that in my new install I am using a framebuffered console, but I have tried turning the framebuffer off, as well as using a 2.6 kernel, all with no success. I can fix the problem by shutting down X and restarting it, but it seems there should be a cleaner/lesspainful way to restore my display. Below are the relevent facts about my laptop.

XFree86 Version 4.3.0
Release Date: 27 February 2003
X Protocol Version 11, Revision 0, Release 6.6
Build Operating System: Linux 2.4.22 i686 [ELF]
Build Date: 16 September 2003

Linux version 2.4.22 (root@midas) (gcc version 3.2.3) #6 Tue Sep 2 17:43:01 PDT 2003

Video Card: AGP NeoMagic MagicGraph256ZX 256-bit graphics accelerator; 4MB SGRAM

It could be my imagination, but it seems that when switching VTs in redhat, X was somehow 'reset', the screen res would seem to flicker and things would appear properly again, perhaps there is some setting that makes the VT switching process longer but safer? Same sort of thing for suspend perhaps? Any help is greatly appreciated

Wow. This is exactly the same problem that I have with my Thinkpad 600x and Slackware 10.2. I didn't have the problem with Mandriva or Debian and I noticed the same "flicker" reset effect. I also have the same problem after suspend. I am using a 2.6 kernel (standard from Slackware) and xorg. Did you solve your problem? I'd love to hear how you did it .......