After much heartache, I have finally been able to get my nvidia driver installed correctly. Everything works fine in X, but when I leave X to go back to the console, the screen is a garbled mess of colors and is unreadable. The problem is not corrected until I do a full reboot.

I am running Slackware with X11 6.9 (xorg) and KDE 3.5.1 However I belive the problem is not the windows manager. The problem still persists if I load X with out any windows manager and ctrl+alt+backspace out of it. This is pretty important to me since I have a slow computer and only use X when I need it.

Does anyone have any sugestions on where to begin debugging this little problem? I would also like to know which (if any) log files X uses to dump errors into. I am by no means a linux expert, but I do like to tinker. Any information would be greatly aprietiated.

thanks!
...drkstr

Hey I have had this problem before, mainly with slackware.

Try turning off any boot time frame buffer stuff (thats the VGA=xxx lines in your grub.conf/lilo.conf)

Also if you stopped using KDE and chose something more lightweight like iceWM or openbox you may find X much more useable. ( I am running it on a 1987 Sun machine quite happily )


Hope that helps
-Rob

This is a known bug with nvidia drivers. I have read that using:

Option "IgnoreDisplayDevices" "TV"

in xorg.conf is a fix for it, *if* you don't have or want to use TV out. If you do the only option is as previous poster stated set vga=normal in lilo or other boot loader

Yippee it works! Thanks for the advice cyber. I really should look into getting a lighter windows manager. My computer would thank me. Also, thank you dive for the alternate method, I haven't tried it yet but I hope it works. I will miss my pretty console if it doesn't. I'll let you know how it goes.

thanks again!
...drkstr

Your Welcome

Adding Option "IgnoreDisplayDevices" "TV" was not able to help in this particular instance. But thank you anyway for responding. I will just not run framebuffer mode until I can find another solution.

thanks!
...drkstr

Yes vga=normal is the only solution that worked for me too.

It may help to file a bug report at nvidia about this - the more the merrier.

I've seen the bug posted on the nvidia forum several times but they seem to ignore it. Seems like they think if we use X we won't be wanting to use console ever . Maybe if enough people post or mail them about it, it may get fixed one day....