Hello... This one has puzzled me for a while, and I cant find much information on it.
Recently I installed debian on a pentium laptop with 24mb ram via floppy
it took me a long time but i was pleased with the result.
When I finally managed to install XFree, and booted X, a fuzzy screenshoot looking windows 95 booting image was displayed on the screen, for a good 15 seconds, before the X background and mouse were initialized.
I have noticed this before on my other computers, when X starts i get a very quick fuzzy dump of what yesterdays desktop looked like before X was killed...
so im thinking this crap im seeing as X is starting comes from a portion or ram that is re-used as a sort of frame buffer, and becuase the machine boots into pretty much the same portion of ram every time, X would use the same bit of ram every boot right ??
the windows 95 one on this laptop troubled me though, becuase it was a good 2 days since windows was booted ... the 24mb of ram has been used and re-used many a time trying all the different 'linux on a floppy' distros out there.
so this garbage im seeing cant be coming from ram. and why do i see only X garbage (ie a mangled version of my previous kde desktop) and not a fuzzy version of ncurses or terminal screen or the last thing the graphics card showed on the screen before power off?
is there another form of video memory in computers that stores this data? does anybody know anything about this kinda stuf?
or has anybody experienced the same thing? lol
Cheers
Dave.
[edit]
this is an image of the X session before reboot:
http://dtbaker.is-a-geek.com/blah/lapcrap/before.jpg
this is the garbage displayed for about 15 seconds as X is starting up after a reboot (which took 7 minutes :P )
http://dtbaker.is-a-geek.com/blah/lapcrap/after.jpg
Dave.