Bug#611452: xserver-xorg-core: switching to linux console leaves screen blank

[Carsten Allefeld]

Hi Andreas,

> Did you mean squeeze instead of lenny? At least this information

Yes, sorry, I meant squeeze.

I reorder your suggestions in the order I tried them:

> 1. Try to reproduce the problem with a free driver, e.g. nv or nouveau
> instead the the non-free nvidia driver. In /etc/X11/xorg.conf change the
>         Driver "nvidia"
> line to "nv" or "nouveau" and reboot (or stop X, rmmod nvidia, start X,
> but a reboot is probably better to create a clean (and reproducible)
> environment).
> Or just move xorg.conf away and reboot, X autoconfiguration is advanced
> enough to not need a xorg.conf for a default setup with free drivers.
> Ensure the nvidia kernel module is not loaded (will be autoloaded if
> listed in /etc/modules)
>    lsmod | grep nvidia
> should list nothing (test this after X has been started).

I removed all the nvidia-related packages and modified xorg.conf to use the 
nouveau driver. This removed the problem, the virtual linux consoles are 
working normally.

> 3. Also test a minimal xorg.conf for the nvidia driver as described in
> /usr/share/doc/nvidia-glx/README.Debian - eventually some of the options
> in your xorg.conf (which seems to originate from some time ago) are
> problematic nowadays.

I reinstalled the nvidia packages from squeeze and replaced my old xorg.conf 
with the minimal one just loading the nvidia driver. The problem was as 
before, blank screen after switching to the console. So it seems the problem 
is related to the non-free nvidia packages.

> 2. If the problem seems to be related to nvidia, please try the driver
> currently in experimental, it may have been fixed by upstream inbetween.

Here I'm not entirely sure whether I did it correctly. I manually installed 
the packages 
  nvidia-glx_260.19.21-1_i386.deb
  libgl1-nvidia-glx_260.19.21-1_i386.deb
  nvidia-kernel-dkms_260.19.21-1_i386.deb
  nvidia-settings_195.36.24-1_i386.deb
downloaded from http://packages.debian.org/sid/, using dpkg -i, automatically 
removing the squeeze packages in the process. There seems to be no nvidia-
settings package 260.* in experimental right now. The problem persists as with 
the packages in squeeze. But maybe there are other experimental packages I 
should have installed as well? Anyway, nvidia-settings says I'm using driver 
version 260.19.21.

Btw., is there a better way to quickly pull in a package from experimental & 
its dependencies? I know there is apt-pinning, but I don't want to litter my 
package information cache with all the experimental packages just to briefly 
try out a few of them.

Thank you,
Carsten