Ravings on CS, OSs, PLs, SF, and other things geeky...

I had this weird issue in Fedora 6 and 7 where after enabling the NVidia X drivers, the screen would go blank during shut-down or when switching to console via CTRl+ALT+1 etc. The refresh rate seemed to pass the monitor’s legal values and thus the blank screen. No matter how I tried fiddling with the monitors refresh rates in my xorg.conf nothing would work. Even after these suggested “safe” values:

HorizSync    28-64
VertRefresh  43-60

or these mode-lines, confirmed for my monitor:

ModeLine     "1280x1024_75.00" 138.5 1280 1368 1504 1728 1024 1025 1028 1069 -hsync +vsync
ModeLine     "1024x768_60.00" 64.1 1024 1080 1184 1344 768 769 772 795 -hsync +vsync

Then today when trying to figure out how to get a console to work all cool and un-stretched like on a WXGA screen, I came across this kernel parameter video=vesafb:ywrap:mtrr. Then I also came across the fact that NVidia supports the vesa framebuffer and figured I would give it a try, modifying my grub config file thus:

kernel /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.22.9-91.fc7 ro root=LABEL=/1 rhgb quiet video=vesafb:ywrap:mtrr vga=0x31B

Lo and behold, very high resolution, very small characters and my shut-down screen and consoles are back!