Bugzilla – Bug 141034
NVIDIA Driver Fails to Return to Text Mode
Last modified: 2006-01-04 07:06:08 UTC
Summary: on shutdown, NVIDIA driver does not return to text mode. I installed SuSE 10.0 on my machine without problems. Video is an on-motherboard GeForce 4MX Series video graphics processing unit. I then loaded the patch to the NVIDIA video driver. Afterwards, the video worked fine except that when shutting down the machine, the machine does not enter text mode. Consequently, the screen becomes an unreadable hash of red and green squares.
cntl-alt-F6 gives a blank screen. The pty is still there, just invisible. cntl-alt-F7 returns to graphics mode.
is it text mode or framebuffer? Have you tried vga=normal as bootparameter?
Brian: Is there a chance that this oboard-chip uses shared memory? In that case, the BIOS of your board might be buggy and not reporting the correct amount of memory to the OS. With some NVIDIA-chips/configurations it is also a known problem that switching between fb and X causes problems. You might try to use the same resolution for X and the framebuffer, which sometimes solves this problem. If you're using shared memory graphics, you can use mem=...M as a boot append line to manually set the free memory of your system. Please note that the NVIDIA binary (closed source) driver cannot be supported directly by us. On the other hand, the support for the 440MX was terminated by NVIDIA AFAIK. Hope this helps you.
Setting vga=normal fixes the problem, although the framebuffer mode (I didn't know that it was called that) has very a large, unsatisfying type size. It was vga=0x31a before. I will try playing with the memory boot parameter next. Thanks!
mem=2048M didn't help any. Setting vga=0x31b rather than vga=0x31a did. The trick seems to be matching the resolutions, including color, as you said. Problem solved -- thanks!
You're welcome. Closing this as fixed.