On my Powermac G4 (quicksilver) running Ubuntu Edgy, during boot up, there is no splash screen. After the yaboot prompt, the screen goes completely white for a minute or so, and eventually the gdm login screen appears.

Once the computer has started, when I try to switch to a virtual terminal, (control + alt + F Key) - I get, a black and white distorted version of my previous screen.

On shutdown, the screen looks like it does when I try to get a virtual terminal - the screen shows a black and white distorted version of my last screen.

Both problems started when I upgraded to Dapper.

I am using a GeForce2 MX card with the nv driver.

Here is my yaboot.conf:

image=/boot/vmlinux
label=Linux
read-only
initrd=/boot/initrd.img
append="quiet splash"

If I remove "quiet" from the append line, the computer will not boot (monitor goes to standby (no signal) after yaboot prompt). If I remove "splash", there is no change (screen still goes white, still no terminals).

I don't think the problem is with Ubuntu's usplash package - I removed it and the problem didn't go away. Although I am not certain, I think this might have something to do with the frame buffer (all the documentation I read said that the startup screen was tied to the frame buffer), but again, I'm not sure.

Although having a working startup splash image would be nice, I am more concerned with the lack of virtual terminals.

Thank you for any help.

I don't have a mac, but a similar problem on my Pentium machine was solved by appending "vga=normal" to the kernel arguments.
So, where you have append="quiet splash", try append="quiet splash vga=normal"
HTH

I added vga=normal to my yaboot.conf file, and ran ybin to update the system, but the problem didn't go away.

Just in case anyone else has this problem, it appears to be fixed in Feisty.

Also, the problem can be fixed in Dapper or Edgy by recompiling the kernel and including the Riva framebuffer with the kernel instead of making it as a module.