Fresh installs of RHL 8.0, fully updated These machines (Gateway e-3400s) have i815 video chipsets. They fail ~50% of the time when switching from a running 16-bit 1024x768 X session to a text VC; they switch, but when you switch back to X, the X server has died Switching to 24-bit 1024x768 seems to prevent this
How about phoebe2?
phoebe 2 does seem to fix that w/ both phoebe2 and 8, running multiple X servers is possible in 24-bit mode but not in 16-bit mode (dies with agpgart errors when starting the second X). That's probably a hardware / kernel issue, though, I would think?
Running more than one X server simultaneously on a single video card is not supported. It works rather flawlessly with many combinations of hardware, but not with others. The failures tend to be video card specific, or to be related to wether a given card is primary or secondary (such as 3Dfx hardware), or it can be some other combination of factors. It is generally rather hardware specific. Considering the number of users who actually use multiple X servers simultaneously, compared to the number of users who have reported inability to get just a single head up and running and video working, bug troubleshooting/debugging prioritizaiton must be assigned to getting hardware working for more people who it does not, so special-case scenarios like multiple X servers on one box, which are much rarer, take very low priority. Rather than leave them sit at low priority, and most likely never get any attention due to there always being higher priority bugs to fix, my best recommendation would be to report issues like that directly to xfree86 mailing list. I'd rather be honest with you than leave such a bug open for 2 years and not ever touch it simply due to prioritization. Since you've indicated phoebe 2 resolves the originally reported issue, closing RAWHIDE.