After system upgrades, tty environment on my computers is broken

fatblueduck · 2010-01-24 08:05:46

After upgrading two different computer systems, my tty environment is broken in both of them. Text begins to appear in rows where I am typing and ncurses based programs cause hard crashing and will display strange text in seemingly random locations on the screen.

Maybe this is a problem with the current kernel's fbdev driver implementation?... I have never seen this before and previously thought of tty as being stable and safe.

Does anyone know what is going on here?

Both computers are completely different. One is an 'old' eeepc surf and the other is an intel/core-duo/nvidia custom machine.

jasonwryan · 2010-01-24 08:22:51

Without any more detailed information, I'd hazard a guess that you have moved up to 2.6.32. If that is the case, then you might want to look at KMS http://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Int … Setting.29

fatblueduck · 2010-01-24 08:43:03

jasonwryan,

Thanks for the guess, but I'm sorry to report that I followed the KMS instruction and rebooted and my problem remains.

There are two other things I noticed. When I 'su' inside the tty, the text behind root's prompt is very lengthy... instead of [root@duck_arch_linux duck]# it's showing a much longer label. Also, the resolution in the tty is very low now compared to the way things were before.

jasonwryan · 2010-01-24 08:49:52

It might be worth posting the root prompt, in case that provides a clue for others reading the thread. It would also be helpful if you were able to recall, or post the logs, of the upgrades that precipitated this. Otherwise, I'm at a loss...

fatblueduck · 2010-01-24 08:57:57

I sent dmesg to a file and opened the file in emacs and the entire tty began blinking until I used startx.

Sorry. I did not write down the packages that were being updated but I feel like this is a kernel issue as I had not updated either machine in about 1 or 2 months and did notice the new kernel in the update queue. Here's a link to my dmesg:
http://www.pastebin.ca/1763753

I will write down the entire line that appears as root's prompt in tty, but I assure you there is no useful information contained in it.

fatblueduck · 2010-01-24 09:00:54

Oh gosh I've returned and the blinking tty nearly blinded me. Here is root's tty prompt:

;duck@duck_arch_linux:/home/duck[root@duck_arch_linux duck]#

jasonwryan · 2010-01-24 09:05:55

Um, looking through your dmesg, it looks like you still have "video=775" in your menu.lst - that couldn't be the case, could it?

fatblueduck · 2010-01-24 09:07:52

No I just tried adding that after noticing that my tty had lowered resolution.

OK -I took the vga statement out. I'm sorry that was confusing. Anyway, the problem is persisting and I updated my dmesg:
http://www.pastebin.ca/1763757

Last edited by fatblueduck (2010-01-24 09:15:20)

fatblueduck · 2010-01-24 09:17:38

I did not 'do' anything unusual to my tty environments. I have never felt the need to have high-res tty and so my tty on both machines has been the basic tty with no vga statements (until I tried one a few minutes ago) and no special kernel compilations.

jac · 2010-01-24 20:20:44

I'm sorry to say that I don't know much about situations such as this, but you can get the list of what you upgraded from /var/log/pacman.log . That might help someone else help you debug it

fatblueduck · 2010-01-25 00:41:28

Hey jac thanks for information.

Here's my FULL pacman.log
http://www.pastebin.ca/1764635

I'm certain that the problems started happening after the update on 2010-01-20. I mostly use the tty on that machine and that's why I noticed the problem so quickly.

I thought it would go away with the next kernel update, but that didn't happen and when I noticed the problem on my other machine I started to worry.

Arch Linux

#1 2010-01-24 08:05:46

After system upgrades, tty environment on my computers is broken

#2 2010-01-24 08:22:51

Re: After system upgrades, tty environment on my computers is broken

#3 2010-01-24 08:43:03

Re: After system upgrades, tty environment on my computers is broken

#4 2010-01-24 08:49:52

Re: After system upgrades, tty environment on my computers is broken

#5 2010-01-24 08:57:57

Re: After system upgrades, tty environment on my computers is broken

#6 2010-01-24 09:00:54

Re: After system upgrades, tty environment on my computers is broken

#7 2010-01-24 09:05:55

Re: After system upgrades, tty environment on my computers is broken

#8 2010-01-24 09:07:52

Re: After system upgrades, tty environment on my computers is broken

#9 2010-01-24 09:17:38

Re: After system upgrades, tty environment on my computers is broken

#10 2010-01-24 20:20:44

Re: After system upgrades, tty environment on my computers is broken

#11 2010-01-25 00:41:28

Re: After system upgrades, tty environment on my computers is broken

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