[Feisty,Gutsy] Switching to tty yields black screen (SiliconMotion)

[K.Mandla]

Binary package hint: xorg

I know this is particularly old and particularly unusual hardware, but on a Sotec e-Note 100 notebook (K6-2) with a SiliconMotion SM712 LynxEM+ video card, jumping from the X environment to any tty screen yields a black screen.

The tty is still active, and I can type commands into the terminal, but there is no video output. Pressing CTRL+ALT+F7 returns me to the X environment with no visible error. Exiting X with CTRL+ALT+Backspace yields the same dead screen, but restarting X (with startx again) will not bring back a visible GUI.

The X environment functions normally before and after switching between tty screens, with video colors, dimensions, depth and mouse control all as expected.

This bug occurs on a default system in both Gutsy and Feisty, command-line-plus-X or a full Gnome environment. Both the siliconmotion and vesa drivers give the same results. Other distros behave normally, with both the 1.4.1 and 1.5.1 siliconmotion drivers and other versions of X.

There seem to be other bugs that are similar, but not with this hardware.

From lspci -nn | grep VGA ...

01:00.0 VGA compatible controller [0300]: Silicon Motion, Inc. SM712 LynxEM+ [126f:0712] (rev a0)

Thanks in advance

[penalvch (penalvch)]

K.Mandla, Thank you for reporting this bug to Ubuntu. Gutsy reached EOL on April 18th, 2009.
See this document for currently supported Ubuntu releases: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Releases

Is this an issue on a supported release? If so, could you please execute the following command, as it will automatically gather debugging information, in a terminal:
apport-collect 177614

Please ensure you have xdiagnose installed, and that you click the Yes button for attaching additional debugging information.

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

[Expired for xorg (Ubuntu) because there has been no activity for 60 days.]