My computer starts up in 1024x768x256c text mode. Everything is fine, and I type startx. Everything is still fine once I am in X. If I close X, or just CTRL+ALT+F1 to get back to a text mode terminal, I just have garbage on my screen. There are large pixels of various colors scattered about the screen. It looks like it's in some sort of 160x200 graphics mode. It just started doing this a few days ago. The only changes I made were to my xorg.conf file, trying to get my TV-Out to work as a secondary display, but I made a backup... when the TV-Out didn't work, I just reverted to my backup xorg.conf, so everything is back to normal. What really gets me is how my video is fine before I go into X, but then screwed up after. Any ideas? I wish I could describe it better, but the only way I could do that is if I took a picture of it... which would mean learning how to pull pictures off of my digital camera in linux

Thanks.

PS: After exiting X and seeing garbage, I can still type commands. I just can't see what I'm typing. So I can login as root to shutdown/reboot, or I can just start X back up again and X works fine. But as soon as I exit again (or switch to a non-X TTY), I get the screwed up video.

The quick fix would be set vga=normal in your lilo.conf or grub.conf as I think it is
a framebuffer problem.

If you want to keep framebuffer (and vga=xxx) you have to recompile your kernel with
framebuffer settings compatible with your video card (is it a nvidia one ?)

Yes, it's a GeForce2 MX400 64MB. I guess I'll just set vga=normal for now, until I'm ready to try compiling a new kernel.

Do not forget to run lilo (if you use it) to take the change in account for the next boot

well that fixed it... just wish I knew why it stopped working :\

I think there is driver conflict between framebuffer driver and vesa X driver
when using nvidia cards.
Sometimes even the official nvidia driver conflicts with framebuffer if kernel
has been compiled with CONFIG_FB_VGA16. To fix that, you have to recompile
the kernel without CONFIG_FB_VGA16 but with CONFIG_FB_VESA enabled.

That's good to know. Thanks.