Recently installed slackware64 14.1 on my Macbook Pro (mid-2009, macbookpro5,5), whch has the Nvidia GeForce 9400M card.

At first, I had a little trouble with booting (kept getting frozen at):
To get past this, I added 'nomodeset' to the kernel options, blacklisted nouveau and installed the nvidia drivers (version 331.20). Now, boot up is fine, and I can 'startx' and the GUI looks good.

However, when I press ctrl-alt-F[1-6], I only get a blank (turned off) screen. when I press ctrl-alt-F7, I can get back to X, and continue in my GUI.

This bug seems to have appeared in different forms across ubuntu, arch, debian etc..

I'd really like to have a console, even with the GUI. Any tips or help is appreciated.

Hi,

have you tried some slightly older drivers? It may be a bug in this specific version.

1 members found this post helpful.

I've tried versions 331, 325, 319 (I installed 319 with the slackbuild scripts from slackbuilds.org) and even 304. Various threads (including some on the nvidia forums) seem to show that something similar to this was fixed in 304. This leads me to believe that there must be something I can change about my specific configuration...

Also, I am using gummiboot, but I have tried grub as well with the same result.

Now that you have installed the nVidia proprietary driver, have you tried removing the 'nomodeset' kernel option?

1 members found this post helpful.

Yes, I have two options on in my gummiboot menu, one with 'nomodeset' and one without, both boot fine and display the GUI correctly. Yet, no console TTYs...

I have a theory, while looking at /var/log/messages, I noticed that efifb is set to the framebuffer device /dev/fb0. Is it possible that when the X server starts, it binds to /dev/fb0 and the console is left without a framebuffer device? I could be completely wrong and this might sound more than wrong...

EDIT:
My kernel options (just two):
- root=/dev/sda2 resume=/dev/sda3 ro
- root=/dev/sda2 resume=/dev/sda3 ro nomodeset

Let me know if I should try others.

I found this link that seems relevant to your situation. https://devtalk.nvidia.com/default/t...en-starting-x/
As I read it,the nVidia proprietary driver cannot switch back to the efifb frame buffer.

It was reported that switching to ttys can be achieved using the nouveau driver.

You should also look at /usr/src/linux/Documentation/fb/efifb.txt
It gives details of kernel options for loading efifb.