[techtalk] mandrake weirdness

[hobbit at aloss.ukuu.org.uk]

On Fri, Jul 12, 2002 at 05:30:37PM -0400 or thereabouts, Tania Morell wrote:
> not sure what you call it when you hit ctrl+alt+F<1-6> to get a new 
> terminal/shell/whatever 

"Changing [switching, flipping...] virtual consoles"?

It's not really a new shell, but I hesitate to pontificate because
I'll get it all wrong :) 

> but when I attempt to do this with my workstation while x is still 
> running, I get no terminal. (as you'd expect.)  instead I get a frozen 
> image of my X desktop ..   When I hit alt+ctrl+F7, then it takes me 
> back to regular X and i can move the mouse again.    If I kill X 
> completely or init 3, then I get a frozen, blank, blue screen instead.
> 
> anyone ever encounter this problem before?    so far noone i've asked 
> has ever seen it.  I've STFW and can't find mention of a similar problem.  
> 
> I guess I could just reboot to clear it up but I have 317 day uptime on 
> this thing and really don't want to mess that up.  ;)     can anyone 
> think of any quick fixes?

I can't think of quick fixes, but I have indeed had boxes where 
when X is not running, you can flip virtual consoles with no 
trouble. But when X is running, flipping from F7 to the text 
virtual consoles causes, um. "issues". I have never seen a 
frozen image of the X session -- although actually, come to
think of it, I've seen something similar very recently. Instead,
I would find great garish slabs of colour everywhere. 

In general, such problems have been combinations of chips and
video cards and XFree86 for me. I do have one Cyrix MediaGX box
which was implicated in well over half of the problems I had:
possibly it was 80% of them. There are known issues with this
thing and with the server for it, as far as I know.

I am afraid that some of my more disastrous X incidents have
resulted not only in a need to reboot, but in a need to physically
switch the box off and on again after shutting down. This may
not be the news you wanted to hear. On the other hand, you're
probably not running on a MediaGX which delights in doing this
to me when I don't want it to, so you're probably all right.

Telsa