On Sat, 4 Dec 1999, Patrick Welche wrote:

> Matthias Drochner wrote:
> > 
> > prlw1@cam.ac.uk said:
> > > Is there a way of changing the colours displayed by the virtual
> > > terminals? My problem is that I am getting black on black.. 
> > 
> > Hmm - do you think it is likely that eg blue-on-black is
> > visible on your screeen while while-on-black is not?
> 
> Not really - chances are nothing is appearing at all - the monitor beeps
> suggesting no signal. black-on-black seems like a nice way of saying that
> I can change over to a virtual console, log in, type things, logout, but
> nothing at all ever appears on the screen.

I just installed the XFree 4.0 snapshot (3.9.1) and now I have the
same problem. On boot the text screen is ok and X starts up fine, but
once started, the ws screens remain black.

> > I'd say there is a more serious problem with your setup.
> 
> Agreed.
> 
> > If you can't try another graphics card
> 
> Well I could, but it runs X so I can carry on using it as is, but it would
> nice to get it to work: it is the onboard graphics of a Dell OptiPlex G1.

My card is a
vga1 at pci1 dev 0 function 0: 3Dfx Interactive Banshee (rev. 0x03)
wsdisplay0 at vga1: console (80x25, vt100 emulation)

I have one of the screens defined as 
wsdisplay0: screen 5 added (80x50bf, vt100 emulation)

On most boots, this screen shows a broken underscore character in place
of any character with a blank attribute. All characters, incl space
show up "back on black".

> text on the bottom line, but I also have a flashing underline cursor which
> stays put at 0,2 from bottom left hand corner.

None of the ws screens have any cursor.

BTW, this is on i386, with -current of Nov 24.
-- 
    - aew