Having run slackware 11 desktop on a PC with an ATI Radeon 7000 card rather nicely. I installed slackware 12 on the same machine and noticed after configuring Xorg that the kdm logon screen chooses a virtual screen much larger than the 1024x768 resolution set in Xorg.

My Xorg settings in Slack 12, as generated by xorgconfig, are the same as in Slack 11. Yet kdm (and KDE initially ) runs with that virtual resolution setting. I've been told that a virtual screen will be selected if found in Xorg, but there's no virtual resolution line in "Display" or "Screen" stanzas in xorg.conf

I can change KDE's resolution from within the desktop, but no luck so far with KDM's logon screen.

Some observations, kdm is no longer resetting the Xserver on logout as in Slack 11, but attempting a logout without restarting the server, It's led to lockouts on logoffs when changing users and attempts to change run level to 3 within a KDE terminal (as root) no longer seem to work.

Since Slackware 12 is using Xorg 7.2 and has placed KDE in the /usr area, I was wondering if somewhere kdm and KDE are grabbing initial screen settings from initialization files there, rather than using xorg.conf found in /etc/X11.

Seems a lot of nice initial settings got dropped this time. Any hints on where to hunt this down?

Try if possible to re-use the Slack-11.0's xorg.conf ?
How is it working with VESA? if good then is the Radeo driver broken (again)?

1.when i perform ctrl+alt+backspack in the kde tty ,then i switch to other tty ,the screen is unstable,can't display the text clearly

2,when i perform "end session",kde logout but the login screen won't show up anymore,the screen show some random dots,but mosty black,and i can't switch to other tty ,but i can perform"ctrl+alt+delete" to restart my pc

@bgoct
The console is there but it's in a 'braindead' state
You can even blind-type
and get back to
The issue is X's fault. X fails to restore the console in a valid state.
This did happen before on ocasion, and got fixed too, more times.

Thanks SCerovec,your post can explain all the weird thing i have ever met.

And after days googling,I can boild the problem down to the follow reason:

1.When X server restarted by performing"ctrl+alt+backspace" or "end session"in kde,the X dosn't restore the monitor modes correctly,or re-initialize it.

2.when step 1 performed,then switch to other VT,form example,the vesa frame buffer,the framebuffer dosn't initialize the monitor either.

=
but when i use VMware to install slackware,this problem dosn't show up,why????

But i don't know how to fix it,or are there any options can be set in the xorg.conf to make the X server restore the framebuffer modes,or re-initialize the monitor???Anybody has any clues please let me know.

You might refer to the swsusp (software suspend) documentation. There was the exact issue while restoring the state back from suspend...

When Mandrake resolved this, the tty-s got back to work too.

My apologies for being slow to respond, I've been out a few days.

Two things I had to do. I replaced the stock ATI driver with the optional ATI xorg drive found in the extra section of the slack CD set. And in kdm, I found /etc/kde/kdm/kdmrc and added 'TerminateServer=true' under the heading [x-*-Core]to force kdm to restart X-server on logout.

Both seem to work. I can logout and change run levels. The same can be said for using VESA.

However, even under the other ATI driver, the KDE CD player, kscd locks up the CD player (unable to eject, even using the command line!) when stopping, or pausing the player. Which remains till one reboots.

I don't know if the kscd issue is related to the ATI/xorg problems. I'm not happy with the state of the open xorg drivers for ATI running older radeon video cards. Cards I've kept to avoid problems with the open source drivers. ;p

---edit---
Shutting HAL down (chmod -x /etc/rc.d/rc.hald) seemed to have solved the kscd issue. Back to manual mounting I guess.

adding 'TerminateServer=true' is just a backup resolution,it can fix the kde logout problem.but when you logout kde,the Xserver is restarted,then if you perform "ctrl+alt+F1" to switch to other linux console ,the screen will become mess up,but if i press my IBM function key "Fn+F7" to switch to CRT and press again to switch back,the monitor recover and become stable,I don't know why,may be somebody who is familiar with the linux video system can explain this!!!

@bgoct
It's the fact that the zapping (alt+Fn) doesn't reset the monitor's mode, just the VGA's mode. When You do the Fn+F7 the monitor gets resetted and hence the view back
This is a issue between X and FBconsole: they use different calculations for EDID and different modes too.
Either (or both) X or FB should reset the video device upon invocation and abundance.

So is there anything we can do about it??I want both DRI and vesafb to work together.but now,if I enable DRI in xorg.conf,when Xserver restarted by kde,the vesafb console screen will become a mess,althought I can use "Fn+F7"to make it normal again, I think that is a backup method.If press "Fn+F7" twice can make it right,there must be some thing we can do in software level.but how,or just wait for a new version of X???