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...