text console garbled from boot up

[Hubert Figuiere]

linux-image-2.6.17-10-386 2.6.17-10.26

The text console is garbled from the boot. X works fine, if I switch back to the text console, it is still garbled.

I don't have my camera so I can't post a shot of what I see yet.

[Hubert Figuiere (hub)]

attached is a picture of my screen AFTER bootup, X11 and everything when I switched back to tty1 using alt-F1

and if you have trouble reading what is on, it is because it is what the bug is about. This start right when the message "booting kernel..." is displayed.

[Hubert Figuiere (hub)]

interestingly after successfuly reverting to 2.6.15-19 (that works) I still have THAT problem. It is not grub either.

[Emmanuel Pacaud (emmanuel-pacaud)]

I have the same issue on my two machines: a custom AMD 2.8 GHz desktop box with an ATI radeon rv 100 card and a Dell D610 laptop with an intel i915 video chip.

These two machines run edgy and this issue appears with edgy.

The desktop box switch from dapper to edgy was done some months ago.
I've upgraded the latop from dapper to edgy yesterday.

[Hubert Figuiere (hub)]

Now it looks better. grub is still messed-up, but as soon as the kernel is loaded, everything is straight and square. I still use 2.6.15-19 as a kernel.
I don't know what package was responsible of the problem.

[Josito (joseifg)]

I have the same problem after upgrading dapper (kernel 2.6.15) to edgy (kernel 2.6.17). The splash screen looks ugly, and when the X starts, switching to consoles with CTRL + ALT + Fx no text can be seen, but only colorful garbage on screen. Any text typed in the console cannot be seen at all, even garbled, the screen doesn't change. Switching back to X works perfectly. Going back to kernel 2.6.15 fixes the problem. I have found a workaround: passing the parameter vga=0x318 to the kernel 2.6.17 at booting forces a vesa mode 1024x768 16M so the splash screen now looks fine and texts appears ok in this mode. I suppose other modes also work fine (I cannot find a vesa mode for my lcd display of 1280x800, ¿anybody knows?). Maybe this problem is caused because the kernel doesn't initialize text mode framebuffer after booting (at least, not the same way as the former kernel does). Waiting to see your comments...

[Daan Pareit (daan-pareit-intec)]

Same problem here. The splash screen looks ugly, and when the X starts, switching to consoles with CTRL + ALT + Fx no text can be seen, but only colorful garbage on screen. This is for a ATI Radeon Mobility X700

[Hubert Figuiere (hub)]

I did comment splashimage=(hd0,0)/boot/grub/default-splash.xpm.gz

in the grub menu.lst and this works around the problem. In short it is grub

[Hubert Figuiere (hub)]

not a bug in the kernel, see last comment

[Chris Coulson (chrisccoulson)]

Thank you for taking the time to report this bug and helping to make Ubuntu better. You reported this bug a while ago and there hasn't been any activity in it recently. We were wondering is this still an issue for you? Can you try with latest Ubuntu release? Thanks in advance.

[David Means (dmeans)]

This is an issue for me. The splash screen looks like a series of diagonal stripes. It started happening right after a clean install of 8.04

472$ uname -a
Linux opus 2.6.24-21-generic #1 SMP Tue Oct 21 23:43:45 UTC 2008 i686 GNU/Linux

[Chris Coulson (chrisccoulson)]

Hi David, sorry for not getting back to you. If you are still experiencing this issue, could you please provide the following information:

1. Please include the output of the command "uname -a" in your next response. It should be one, long line of text which includes the exact kernel version you're running, as well as the CPU architecture.
2. Please run the command "dmesg > dmesg.log" after a fresh boot and attach the resulting file "dmesg.log" to this bug report.
3. Please run the command "sudo lspci -vvnn > lspci-vvnn.log" and attach the resulting file "lspci-vvnn.log" to this bug report.
4. Please run the command "lsmod > lsmod.log" and attach the resulting file "lsmod.log" to this bug report.
5. Please attach your /var/log/Xorg.0.log to this bug report.
6. Please try booting in to recovery mode and state whether you experince the problem then.

Thanks in advance.

[etali (etali)]

We'd like to figure out what's causing this bug for you, but we haven't heard back from you in a while. Could you please provide the requested information? Thanks!

[Daan (daan-pareit)]

I reported earlier on this bug, but it is fixed for me by upgrading to the latest ubuntu release (9.10 instead of 8.04)
Best regards.

[etali (etali)]

Thanks for the update,Daan. Based on what you've said I'm closing this bug. Please don't hesitate to report any other issues in the future.