Current mood:	annoyed
Current music:	Keane - Your Eyes Open
Entry tags:	geek, lazyweb

Strange blank screen bugs, or, I want my /dev/tty1 back!
Dear Lazyweb (or at least the geekier portions thereof),

My Ubuntu desktop at home has a strange problem (or rather, two possibly related problems) for which I'm hoping someone on this flist can give me a clue.

The first problem is that once Xorg/X11 has been started, the text Virtual Terminals (e.g. tty1, Ctrl-Alt-F1) become unusable. I can switch to them, but my monitor then goes to standby (I remember some occasions when the monitor complained of an unsupported mode in this situation; that might happen if I turn the monitor off and on again). Switching back to Xorg works correctly; everything's fine from boot time until the first run of Xorg; stopping all Xorgs/gdm doesn't fix it.

The second problem is that when changing Xorg's resolution using XRandR (either using the xrandr tool or when I launch full-screen games in Wine) the screen goes black (the monitor shows no error and doesn't go to standby but is entirely black), until I switch to another VT (be it one of my non-functional text VTs or another Xorg) and back, at which point the screen shows the correct content, in the correct (new) resolution. This happens both when switching to a smaller resolution such as 800x600 and when switching back to my preferred 1600x1200.

My Google-fu appears to be weak and I've really no idea where to start. It's an up-to-date Gutsy install, with nvidia-glx-new 100.14.19+2.6.22.4-14.10 (though this also happened on Debian unstable / the previous generation of nvidia drivers), the graphics card is a LeadTek WinFast A340 aka nVidia Corporation NV34 [GeForce FX 5200] (rev a1) (10de:0322) with 1 DVI and 1 VGA port, and it's connected by DVI to a Dell 2001FP. I have yet to try swapping monitors, but wanted to see if someone recognised the symptoms before I lug the heaviest CRT known to man up the (partly blocked) stairs.

Edit: solved. I bought a new graphics card (still AGP 8x nVidia, but more features and more memory) and the problems went away.