X: can't switch from tty7 to ttyx to tty7 again: blank screen
 

Hello everybody.

Whenever I switch ttys by pressing CTL+ALT+F[1-12] while in X and then switch back to tty7, it gives me a black screen and appears to freeze (can't seem to make it do anything other than spin the HDD by pressing CTL+ALT+DEL). This happens in every window manager and desktop environment I have tried (even Blackbox). The monitor light indicates that there is no signal from the video card.

Also, when I log out of X, if I type "startx" again the same frozen blank screen appears, with one exception: the monitor light says that there is a signal from the video card (but the screen is still black).

Your help will be well-appreciated. :)

--Dane

Did you try to boot without framebuffer (vga=normal) ?

Thanks for the reply!

I tried that and got the same result. Any other ideas?

--Dane

using nvidia card and drivers?

Thanks for posting, __J!

I am using ATI fglrx drivers 8.12.10 (the latest as of this posting) and they seem to be working fine in every other way (3D, etc.). Do you think I may have configured them incorrectly? Can somebody with a 9600 XT or compatible card and a working configuration post the graphical part of their xorg.conf file?

Thanks!

--Dane

P.S. I'm using xorg 6.8.2, but this happened with all the other 6.8.x's too.

I was asking because I used to get this all the time with nvidia drivers ( they seem to react different to different hardware running the same card).

Did you ever fix it?

when I upgraded my mobo, it fixed itself. the old one used an nforce chipset, and it combined with my geforce was so-so, games and everything worked good, but sometimes I would get weird glitches or lockups. My new mobo has a sis chipset, and I haven't had a problem with it yet as far as garbled visuals or lockups ( still using the same card).

Hmmm...I wonder i any of this can be solved with kernel options. (I'm too broke to buy new hardware, no matter how I'd like to!)

I've never used the ati drivers so I can't help you much there. the nvidia ones have an option to use nvidia's agp driver instead of the kernel one, if the ati drivers have that option you could try that and see if it helps.

Only tty6 is active while X is running under std slack configuration.

SOLVED!
 

Hello, everybody. I just downloaded the latest fglrx driver (8.16.20) and viola! Fixed!

Cheers!

--Dane