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To: Alfred Perlstein <perlsta@sunyit.edu>
cc: hackers@freebsd.org, yokota@zodiac.mech.utsunomiya-u.ac.jp
Subject: Re: reset screen hardware? 
In-reply-to: Your message of "Fri, 08 Aug 1997 12:59:19 GMT."
             <Pine.BSF.3.96.970808125605.680B-100000@server.local.sunyit.edu> 
References: <Pine.BSF.3.96.970808125605.680B-100000@server.local.sunyit.edu> 
Date: Sat, 09 Aug 1997 13:57:17 +0900
From: Kazutaka YOKOTA <yokota@zodiac.mech.utsunomiya-u.ac.jp>
Sender: owner-freebsd-hackers@freebsd.org
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>Last night X crashed on me, i thought my machine needed to be rebooted,
>but first i tried to telnet into it, i was able and i killed X and had to
>restart X twice to get it to work, well everything seemed fine after that,
>however my Text consols were all fubar'd and i had no idea how to reset
>the text part of my display to i wound up rebooting anyway.
>
>What could i have done to reset the text screens?

Assuming X hasn't put your VGA hardware in a really strange state for
which you definitely need VGA hardware reset to restore the screen,
you may be able to put your display card back into the text mode by
doing the following:

1. Quit X (you may have a garbled screen after this, but don't mind)
1. Login to the system via network.
2. Become root.
3. Load font as precaution.
   vidcontrol -f 8x16 /usr/share/syscons/fonts/_a_8x16_font_file_name_
4. vidcontrol VGA_80x30 < /dev/ttyv0
5. Cycle through virtual terminals by pressing CTRL-ALT-Fn on the system's
   keyboard. The GENERIC kernel has four of them (ttyv0 through ttyv3).
6. vidcontrol VGA_80x25 < /dev/ttyv0
7. Cycle through virtual terminals.

The idea is to force the console driver to program the VGA chip.  When
switching between virtual terminals, the console driver programs the
VGA only if the mode of the next virtual terminal is different from
the mode of the previous terminal.  The step 4 in the above procedure
puts the virtual terminal 0 into the 80x30 mode.  The other terminals
are in the 80x25 mode, so the console driver should touch the VGA
when switching between the terminal 0 and the others.

Kazu