[SOLVED] My (Self-Caused) Networking (Wi-Fi) and Garbled Virtual Terminal Problems.
 

Yesterday, I received my Panda Wireless Wi-Fi USB device from Amazon.com (Yeah!).

Now, although I have been using Linux since 1998, I have NEVER used a wireless connection. NEVER!!! So, of course, I installed the device in the worst possible, and incorrect, manner. Of course.

I downloaded the Linux driver, that I didn't need, and had followed the instructions which broke all sorts of things with my kernel.

So, I looked at this (LinuxQuestions.org) website for how to fix it. I didn't see any similar solutions to my problem, so I had emailed tech-support from Panda Wireless (pwsupp@gmail.com) They told me I didn't need to run that driver, since the Debian package repository has the driver. (DAMN! I never checked)

So, I undid the makefile that had been included with the driver, installed "firmware-ralink" package, and did a reboot.

Well, when I watched my virtual terminal (all of them via Alt-Ctrl-F[1-6] were garbled. Now when I had rebooted, my desktops looked fine, but my Virtual Terminals were totally hosed. I looked at this (LinuxQuestions.org) website, yet again, and the suggestions didn't help. I did reset, and some other shell commands, I had run "dpkg-reconfigure console-setup", I had even reinstalled my current kernel and headers to no avail.

Fortunately, I keep an older kernel just in case, so before I had asked LinuxQuestions.org for help, I ran my old kernel, and it wasn't mangled.

Cool!

I purged my current kernel, headers, and my nvidia-kernel-dkms, and had re-downloaded these three things, and everything was fine.

YEAH!!!

So, anyway, I thought I should post this message in case anyone has a similarly unsolvable problem.

Hi...

Thanks for posting this, it's bound to help someone at some point. :)

An excellent question and one everyone should ask. For me it is God, the only one worthy of both. :)

Regards...