Hi folks.

Been dabbling with Slackware for a bit now and have always had corrupted-looking penguin logo or wombat or whatever it's supposed to be now, (all 3 or 4 of them, depending on whether or not I have the 4th core enabled) I'm running 13.1, but it also happened with 12.1 and my video card is an old Radeon 1650 pro. The install works flawless otherwise, as does the card, even in Windows, except for one other problem that I kinda think may be related.

When I log out of an X session, I cannot see the terminal text. The screen is too dark, almost black. I can still do what I need to do via blind-typing or by sitting at an angle so that I can see the characters, but it's a real annoying problem that has also persisted from 12.1 after a fresh install on a completely new drive.

I'd really like to solve these problems, especially the last one because it impacts my wife who also uses the system and is new to Linux.

Perhaps try "vga=normal" in your /etc/lilo.conf... my Radeon doesn't work well at all if I try to boot with a VESA framebuffer console and then start X.

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To understand that you use an Phenom x3, using AM3 socket and DDR3 memories (because you talk about unlocking of the 4'st core, specifically for those AMD processors), together with an ol' good Radeon 1650 Pro?

How the Great Deities you have an AGP slot in that mainboard?

Also, why you don't buy an hamburger/wine bottle-priced Radeon HD-4350?

The 'wombat' that you may have seen was actually a Tasmanian Devil afflicted with the terrible facial cancer that is destroying the species:

Devil facial tumour disease
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Devil_f...tumour_disease

This is seen in 2.6.29 and was designed to raise awareness of the plight of these unfortunate animals.

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I tried this without any change. The logos still look rainbowy and corrupted and my terminal is still really dark after I logout an X session. I'm using KDE, BTW. The terminal looks fine other than the penguins before I log into X.

Actually, I have a PCI-X 1650 Pro from Sapphire. Didn't even know that card was available in AGP until just did a search! I want to upgrade to a card with DDR5 soon. There's just not very much that I want to play with that requires that power, so I'm just a'waiting because this one is doing fine for now.

I actually heard about this a while back and just said wombat because I forgot the actual creature and I was too lazy to tab over and search for the real creature. Very nasty organism that is plaguing them, but interesting at the same time. Very sad situation for them and down right horrifying to think of ever crossing to humans.

Thanks for the help guys, but I'm still searching for a fix for this. I'm gonna cross my fingers and see if I can get the ATI proprietary drivers installed and maybe that will fix it?

edit ~ Proprietary drivers aren't going to work with this card. At least unless someone knows some way to get the 9.3 drivers to work with 13.1. I actually might buy that new card now. I just hate to think that I'm forced to do it simply because the software doesn't exist. Maybe I'll go back to Nvidia this time.

I have an AGP x1600. Also does not play well with Lilo. Takes 4 minutes and some seconds for Lilo to display. Not a typo, 4 minutes and ~32 seconds!!! It's a problem with the PCIe to AGP bridge as some other Linux based tools (Western Digital Disk Diag for example) take the same amount of time to load. Grub works fine though.

Back to the issue at hand
Same thing happens here with the Penguin logo. The best I can explain it - the logo is in 4 bit color instead of 256. Never bothered me enough to investigate. Might be something to do with conflicting frame buffer modules. That PC is dismantled right now, so I'm unable to investigate. I do/did not have the dark/blank console. This was on 13.0/.1/current using KMS.

Thanks for letting me know that this is ... normal? I was thinking the same thing, that the actual image is in a low-bit format. Mostly, cause that's exactly what it looks like is going on. I don't think I've ever let the console sit there for that long after logging out of X. Let me try it now and post the results. I don't have an AGP card, but perhaps it could be something similar going on and its worth a try.

Thanks!

Did you reinstall LILO after making this change? With vga=normal in /etc/lilo.conf (and LILO reinstalled) you should not see any penguin logos. If you do, you are still using a VESA framebuffer, which the Radeon drivers do not like (here, anyway).

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Hmmm. That was the problem. I followed your instructions and just chose a different screen mode and the penguin logo problem went away. They are penguins, as I now can tell. Just had to choose VGA=791 which is 1024x768x64k. looks wonderful now and I only have to see if this resolved the console problem as well.

EDIT ~ it worked! The console now look proper after I log out of X.

Thanks for the help. I'm learning LINUX now!