I just installed Nevada build 86 on my Toshiba Tecra M9 laptop with Nvidia graphics card, and there seems to be some problems with the way the Xserver and console-login interact.
If I boot up Nevada into console-login mode, it works great. I can shutdown the machine and restart over and over with no problems. However, if I start the Xserver, then it works the first time just fine. As it boots up I see console messages echoed to the screen before the display manager starts up. When I shut down and reboot, I then do not see any console text echoed to the screen. If I have the system setup for console login, then the screen just stays blank and I ca not do anything but just poweroff. If I have the normal default behavior of having the display manager start automatically, then the system seems to recover and the black screen is replaced with the login screen. However, I can not access the console. If I stop the display manager service, use "exit to console" in CDE login, etc. then I just see a black screen and the only thing I can do is poweroff. My system is dual-boot with Windows. Oddly, I notice that if I boot into Windows, then shut down, then reboot into Solaris, then I never see this problem. As long as I always boot into Windows before booting into Solaris, then I can always log into the console. At least until I start the Xserver. It sort of seems that Solaris leaves the graphics card in an odd state on shutdown and does not reset it properly on reboot. I had a similar, but slightly different, problem when installing Nevada 86 from CD. The first CD started okay, but when it rebooted before installing the 2nd CD, the screen went blank. Fortunately I was able to navigate the install blind by hitting the Return key when the CD light stopped blinking and switching the CD's when it would eject the previous one. The only difference was that in this situation the screen went blank after the Nvidia logo was shown when the Xserver was starting up rather than immediately. I've tried a number of things to fix this, but have had no success: - Tried backporting the Xserver to build 85. - Tried running nvidia-xconfig to create an /etc/X11/xorg.conf file. - Tried commenting out OpenGL from the xorg.conf file Any ideas? Anybody else seeing anything like this? I wonder if people just have not noticed this problem. Since people probably do not access console login much, you might not notice that its broken if you don't see the text messages show up on boot. However, it is a real pain to have to poweroff on the odd occasion when the Xserver or display manager dies, or if you shutdown the display manager to switch to using a different display manager, etc. Brian
