> No... This is not the problem. As I said, X crashed. This makes the X > server quit without restoring the display, so you just get your X > desktop sitting there. You can restart X remotely, but when you exit, > it restores the previous mode, eg a graphical mode instead of a text > console. When I close my current (working) X session, I get static, my > monitor displays a "NO SIGNAL OR RANGE OUT SIGNAL" message and goes > into sleep mode. > [...] > > I did say that the console got FUBARd by killing the X server with -9, > perhaps my assumption that people on this list had prior experience > with this happening was unreasonable. Try it sometime, it's interesting.
I don't think that's too unreasonable. A while ago, the X server for my video card was quite unstable (ATI Mach64 w/chrontel ramdac), and I ended up needing to kill the xserver remotely about once every 2 or 3 days (the xserver would take over the console and refuse to operate correctly). After this happened, I got behavior slightly different than yours: my text consoles would be, for lack of a better phrase, fubar (so, does this deserve a "d" at the end, or perhaps a "-ed" to make it clear? Who knows?). Anyway, it was still a valid video mode -- but it was a graphics mode, and it looked like the kernel was writing standard text into the video memory, yet the graphics card was interpreting it as graphics. It looked bad, and nothing resembling text. I tried all sorts of means of getting the text consoles back. Running svga programs, running X again and shutting down nicely, and using restoretextmode after I'd saved proper settings earlier. The X server would work OK if I ran it again, but I was unable to get the text modes back without rebooting linux. To summarize: I haven't found a better to get back the text consoles than just reboot. John
