This is kinda strange, but I just exited xserver and got back to the console only to find it completely unreadable . It pretty much filled with nonsense (oddly enough, there exists a character for a smiley face ... that was what filled the screen, no, I'm not kidding). It seemed that every command worked properly in this state, as I could restart by typing in 'shutdown -r now', but I could not read what I typed.

I found a similar thread here:
http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...o_threadsearch

What might be relevant is that I just installed new nvidia drivers version 'Latest Legacy GPU version (1.0-96xx series): 1.0-9639'.

And I also upgraded a number of packages before that from the slackware 11.0 patches, notably x11 (all), fontconfig, and freetype.

Dunno if it will happen again, but I hope not. Anyone know what to do about this.

Ahh, and I also installed the latest qt (4.3.0). But, I use fluxbox as my wm.

Oh, I had the same problem with my NVIDIA card before I've bought my ATI about a month ago.
You get corrupted framebuffer and NVIDIA do not even care about this. The only way you will solve this bug completely is to get the vesafb-tng patch (just google it) an enable the vesafb-tng from your kernel config (yeah, you will need to recompile kernel) and this will sort the corrupted framebuffer bug by NVIDIA.

Alright, thanks, I'll look around for it.

I've had ATI cards before ... and, well, I can't say too many good things about them ...

This happens sometimes to me too after exiting X. My video card is intel:
00:02.0 VGA compatible controller: Intel Corporation 82845G/GL[Brookdale-G]/GE Chipset Integrated Graphics Device (rev 03)

The mess is resolved after logging off and logging in again

do you have a (hardware specific) framebuffer compiled in?

Does typing 'reset' help when this happens?

I tried reset, it resets, but the console is still corrupted. But, it hasn't happened again. Maybe it was just nothing. I only have vesafb compiled in.

I've been using the vesafb-tng patch mentioned above and it seems to work fine.

Hi,

What terminal type are you using? xterm? Are you using multiuser login or X11?

If this happens again, try to switch to another console. See what happens. The <LF>reset<LF> should take care of the console. The <LF> is a ctrl-j. Do a 'man reset' or 'man tset'.

He's talking about a tty. Reset doesn't help. The only ways I've found around this problem is to either disable framebuffer consoles or use the kernel patch above.

I'll have to remember to try that type of reset (with Ctrl-J), but I somehow think it won't help.

It's like the console is still working properly, but the character definitions have changed. The smiley face character, for example, had replace the 'space' character. That means that wherever there should have been a 'space', there was a smiley face. The other characters were changed as well.

It hasn't happened since then, so, again, it may have been just a random bug. (probably something with vesafb ... meaning I should use the vesafb-tng patch)

There is also:

It's a well know bug with nvidia drivers, but if it doesn't happen again then no need for the patch. Try using some OpenGL apps and then test the terminal.