Description of problem: After starting the X server, the text consoles display mostly garbage. (The characters are in the right places (except for some blinking garbage here and there) and the mouse pointer is visible, but the font and colors are all wrong.) Fiddling with setfont and switching back and forth between X11 and text console restores it, except for the text being shifted a few pixels to the left. Hardware: IBM Thinkpad T21. 01:00.0 VGA compatible controller: S3 Inc. 86C270-294 Savage/IX-MV (rev 13) Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable): xorg-x11-6.8.2-31 2.6.11-1.1363_FC4 i686 How reproducible: Always. Steps to Reproduce: 1. Boot latest FC devel. 2. Wait for GDM. 3. Ctrl-Alt-F1
I was seeing that as well with a Thinkpad T20 in rawhide. In FC4 I am seeing something else - weird colours where the consoles are suppose to be. Sometimes large bars with one flashing like a huge cursor, sometimes a purple border around a black blank screen. IBM Thinkpad T20 (700MHz) S3 Inc. 86C270-294 Savage/IX-MV Also - sometimes at boot, it does not bring up X but locks up (machine can't even be pinged). If it does bring X up though - X is stable for days. Knoppix does not ever have any issues bringing X up, so it is not hardware issue.
Attach X server log and config file from after problem occurs.
Confirmed here on a Thinkpad T22 with a 01:00.0 VGA compatible controller: S3 Inc. 86C270-294 Savage/IX-MV (rev 13) on Fedora Core 4 using xorg-x11-6.8.2-37 etc. After bootup X11 comes up fine, the text console is actually in pink, characters shifted by a few pixels to the left. The text is readable as long X11 doesn't get restarted. Then the console gets black as also the text. Sometimes it is completely garbled after restarting X11 (e.g. by using ctrl-alt-backspace or init 3 -> init 5). The Savage driver was already sort of broken in FC3 and RHEL 4 but at least the text console was ok. I'm attaching my xorg.conf and log file after the text console is garbled.
Created attachment 115750 [details] xorg configuration for Savage IX on Thinkpad T22 (FC4)
Created attachment 115751 [details] xorg server log file after text console is garbled (blinking characters)
Add-on: the VESA driver runs just fine without disturbing the text console, same for RHEL 3 Savage driver (then still XFree86) on the same hardware.
For me anyway (thinkpad T20) this bug is clearly a duplicate of bug 161242 01:00.0 VGA compatible controller: S3 Inc. 86C270-294 Savage/IX-MV (rev 11) my xorg.conf attached
Created attachment 115840 [details] xorg.conf from thinkpad t20 With this xorg.conf - the virtual console is fixed by replacing fc4 libvgahw.a with the one from fc3
Second that. Just replacing libvgahw.a from Mike Harris (FC3) fixes the problem for me S3 Inc. 86C270-294 Savage/IX-MV (rev 13), too. No other changes applied.
The original reporter has not yet responded, but there are enough other people reporting this problem or very similar problems both in this bug report and in others, that I'm going to conclude the same thing, and mark this as a duplicate of bug #161242. Thanks for the feedback guys! *** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of 161242 ***