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To: Paul English <penglish@hydro.washington.edu>
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From: Lowell Gilbert <freebsd-questions-local@be-well.ilk.org>
Date: 30 Jan 2004 08:42:33 -0500
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Subject: Re: Text consoles don't come back after X
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Paul English <penglish@hydro.washington.edu> writes:

> 	On just one of my machines, I'm seeing a strange problem where
> after X has been started, the text consoles no longer display.  If I
> switch to them using control-alt-F[1-8], OR quit or kill X all I get is a
> blank screen.
> 
> The monitor is getting a signal (the light is flashing green, rather than
> orange), but no matter what key I press, I don't get any display on the
> screen until I switch back to X. The text consoles are still THERE since I
> can log into one, and start another X session - there is just no display.
> 
> It seems almost certain to me that this is some wierd problem with power
> management - the question is what? Is there an effective way that I can go
> through and turn off all power management? This machine is on and in use
> 24x7 anyway, so it is not really needed.

First thing, try turning off all power management in the BIOS.
The second thing will be to remove (not just disable) it 
in your kernel (probably APM, since with a 24/7 machine you're 
presumably running FreeBSD 4.x), but that may not be necessary...