Bug#352676: [Pkg-kbd-devel] Bug#352676: console-setup: switching between X and console destroys configuration

[Anton Zinoviev]

On Mon, Feb 13, 2006 at 02:00:05PM +0100, Norbert Preining wrote:
> 
> But: console-setup works, but after going to X and switching back the
> setup is destroyed.

This happens because sometimes X video driver is unable to restore
properly the state of the console when you switch from X to text-mode.
How severe the problem is depends on the combination
Video-card/X-driver you use.

Notice that all this can happen only if the console is in text-mode,
i.e. you are not using framebuffer.  If you add to /etc/modules the
kernel module for framebuffer you will be able to switch from X to
console whenever you want and the font will never be broken.

Sometimes the problem doesn't exists at all.  It is rumored that some
old videcards (more than 10 years old) fall in this category but I
have never seen such videocard.

The most often case seams to be that the state at the time the X
server is started is remembered.  Try to reboot you computer, if the
problem disappears then you are in this category.  The problem will
reappear if you change the console setup when X Window is already
started.  All videocards I have had are in this category.

And sometimes the console setup is never remembered.  You will have to
use the "setupcon" utility to restore the console setup and hope that
the problem will be fixed in some future version of X Window.  If you
are sure that your videocard is in this category then consider to
prepare a bug report against the xserver-xorg package with detailed
information about your videocard and the log messages of the X server.

> Severity is set to important because the font is messed up so that
> entering umlauts gives me nice line-drawing characters ... which is not
> what I would expect.

I don't know what to do with this bug since it can not be fixed. :-)
If you are in the last category you have two options -- to use
setupcon or framebuffer.

Anton Zinoviev