Space Case writes:

> On Jan 27,  8:11am, Dave Sainty wrote:
> >Space Case writes:
> >> I have in my system a S3/Virge card.  About once a month, something bites
> >> the X server, causing it to coredump and leaves the console unreadable.
> >> (Unless I log in from another system and restart the server, but things
> >> don't come up quite right, then.)
> >> 
> >> Is there any way of resetting the graphics, short of rebooting the system?
> >
> >Have you tried re-running the X server remotely?  It's probably a bug
> >if it doesn't reinitialise the video correctly.  (Either/or
> >X/pcvt/wscons/pccons...)
> 
> Um, yeah, I thought I said that...  It'll bring up the X server OK, but
> KDE's settings are slightly hosed (no terminals autoload).  When I shut
> it down (KDE logout) I still don't get the console (PCVT) back -- it goes
> back to a messed-up screen.

Gawd... must be a bug in my natural language parser :)

Maybe the X server resets the card by reverting to the previous
settings, thus retaining the broken configuration.

It'd be nice if wscons could reset the video hardware to a known
correct state if the X server (or svgalib?) application fails to clean
up.  I don't know if that is possible without having to start
implementing drivers for individual video cards (some standard VGA
reset mechanism perhaps).

Dave