I installed R5A9 last night (since this is alpha is anyone interested in comments about the install?), and its all working great (well almost). The strange thing is that when I do a [ctrl][allt][f1] to get to the console, the screen is messed up I get a bucnh of orange squares on the TV screen. MythTV screens are fine, exiting into the desktop and starting up xterm works fine, but when I switch to the console screen I just get a bunch of orange rectangles on the screen. This is also what I see when I reboot or halt from MythTV (until the computer shuts down or restarts)

Its not a big issue since I don't need to use console now that everyhting is installed and working, but I am wondering why and what I should do about it. I should mention that during Linux startup (before MythTV starts), the screen is fine with the normal white on black letters showing the startup process. Its only after gdm starts that this happens to the console.

It may be the result of the video drivers that you are using for X. I have seen similar results with an ATI video card, where everything appeared normal until X started, then I could not get back to a text mode that I could recognize.

As all else appears to be working, and you don't see an immediate need to go to a text mode system, I would advise leaving it alone for now.

-Rusty

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Master:
- AMD 1800XP on a MSI KT4V motherboard, via KT400 bios
- 120 G Segate Baracuda /, /cache, /myth, swap
- 200 G Segate Baracuda /myth/tv
- 3 Haupauge! WinTV PVR250s
- 19" Daewoo Monitor (1280x1024 ni)

After all the pain I endured trying to get my hardware to work with R4V5 and now having a working system, there is NO way I am going to touch ANYTHING

I was posting to let people know of an "issue". Also, I should mention for anyone interested that with my GeForce MX4000 card, the TV out would not work under X with the boot drivers (even after I edited the X86Config-4 file). The TV out will not work until you load the nVidia drivers (per the directions). The problem is that the directions instruct you to do this AFTER you run mythtv-setup. But you can't run that since it starts after X. Therefore IF you use a TV during install, you should install the nVidia drivers before mythtv-setup (when you get the blank screen use [ctrl][alt][f1] to get to the console, stop gdm, install the drivers (per directions), edit XF86Config-4 (hey what happened to the sample versions?), restart gdm. *** I ASSUME this will work *** In my case when I got the black screen, I disconnected the TV, hooked up a montior, and reinstalled following the directions exactly in the order written. Once the nVidia drivers were in place, my TV out started working.

rteichman,
What you are seeing is a known problem between X and the framebuffer. Doesn't happen to everybody even with the same hardware config. To fix this problem simply change lilo.conf to use
vga=normal and then run lilo to update the config.

Yeah, good catch. I never see the frame buffer because I can't stand it and change lilo.conf to vga=normal almost immediately after install. I just like the console to be in text mode and the GUI to be X. On a lot of computers, I have found fb mode to be problematic and result in wierd inconsistencies that go away when resorting to text mode. Also text mode is easier to read on fuzzy TV displays.

Now, if I could just find the text mode command that supported a 60x25 text mode for console vs. 80x25 I'd be set. There used to be a 40x25 text mode for exactly that purpose long long ago on old CGA cards but I haven't seen it in years. I don't even know if there is a 60x25 mode but it sure would be nice on my crappy TV.

Thanks!

Andrew Lynch

I have the same problem (no monitor, X not working before nvidia setup). I found that things really do work better if you run the first pass of the setup before installing the nvidia drivers. I got around this by:

* When X first starts and the screen is unreadable, go to the console, execute "KnoppMyth-run -~"
* When it prompts for a reboot, go to a second console. And install the nvidia drivers. X pops up imediately with no other tweeks (much better than R4).
* Don't enter the root passwd (i.e. KnoppMyth-run is running for the second time, but the reboot hasn't happened yet). Instead go back to the first console and then answer Y to a reboot.
* It then continues as normal.

Note that I did not need to modify XF86-Config in any way with R5! TV-out worked with no changes with my hardware.

As for the corrupt console after X starts, I found (with R4) that this was affected by the text mode that you choose the first time through. The smallest text mode (80x40 I think) seemed to work best.

Allen

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ASUS AT3N7A-I (Atom 330)
TBS 8922 PCI (DVB-S2)

Well I finally tried this last night since I needed to reboot anyway. I'm sorry to report that it did not work. Any other ideas?


DOH I forgot to run lilo after the change. Ran lilo now all is fine