Installed Nvidia 304.84 driver; no probs. X starts with 'startx' and functions as expected. BUT, when X starts all tty's go black, as seen with Ctrl-Alt-Fn. Stay black after exit from X. No err messages in /var/log/messages or Xorg.0.log. TTY's respond to commands, just no character echo.

Anyone seen this? Got a fix? Nvidia tech service seems baffled.

I'm seeing the same thing on Debian Sid 64 bit running a self-compiled 3.8.5 Kernel and the 304.84 nVIDIA drivers from the repositories.
I had wondered whether it was the result of my kernel updating, and couldn't find any recent reports from a google, so was holding off posting in case it was my mistake.
A few posts going back to last year on Ubuntu forums suggest this has happened to people running Ubuntu (but I don't know which version of drivers) and some on Gentoo forums suggest it's happened with previous driver versions.
I've a GT 640 if that matters.

Edit: I'm seeing the same thing on the 3.2.0-4-amd64 kernel provided by the Sid repos.

it has been my experience that the 304 driver is VERY BUGGY

it has some nasty opengl2 bugs
fixed in 310 and 313

is this a slack install ?
is in what operating system and it's version are you using .

Was "nouveau" installed and used ?
if so you MUST uninstall and or blacklist it
AND
rebuild the boot image WITHOUT nouveau

then you can run the nvidia.run

Well, Sid just updated the driver to 304.88 and I have my ttys back so that would suggest it is a bug in 304.84.

https://www.linuxquestions.org/quest...-a-4175454795/

I can also confirm that 304.88 resolves this.

This kooks like a promising lead...the first one I've seen I might add. As soon as I can I'm going to get 304.88 abd give it a try, assuming that 'nvidia-install --uninstall' doesn't hose my system.

It's gotta be better that going back to an earlier version, which was my last ditch plan.

Thanks to everyone.

Well, upgrading to 304.88 gave me back my tty's!

Thanks to everyone for the help.

Glad to hear it and don't forget to mark the thread solved.

Just saw this thread.

apt-listbugs flagged this issue when I was upgrading to the .84 version last week, so I held it until the fix was released.

It is well worth having installed when running testing/sid.

1 members found this post helpful.

I'd not heard of that descendant_command -- am I right in thinking you just install it and it reports the bugs when you run upgrade or dist-upgrade?

Correct.
Obviously, it only catches bugs that have been reported already, so it is not a magic bullet, but it is a good tool that has saved me some bother on numerous occasions.