MEPIS Community Forum

I've seen some info on the internet saying that Debian, Arch, and some other distros are having problems with recent 2.6.x kernels. The majority seem to have some relationship to video. My M11 does not have any problems even though it uses Debian Squeeze core. I believe Warren gets the credit for this. Does anyone have an insight into how Mepis "escaped" this problem?

edited for spelling

What kind of problems? What video card do you have? It might have to do with the default driver that the kernel uses...

The problem seems to be getting a usable (with text) virtual terminal using "ctrl+alt+<f key>". Both Nvidia and Intel video chips are affected (maybe others?), so I really don"t think it's the video chipset's fault.

My personal card is an Nvidia 9600GS. As I said, I don't have the problem with M11. Squeeze sometimes does. The kernels are similar, but only similar.

Are you saying that M11 and Squeeze are using different default drivers??

I'm having the same problem with 9600M GT with some distros (Debian for example, but not in Arch). I think the problem shows mainly when I use Nvidia's official driver, not sure if it shows up with nouveau driver (I used nouveau in Arch with no virtual terminal problems).

It might not be different drivers, but how different distros load some drivers by default and how/whether they are blacklisted, I'm not sure though what goes on. Or it might have to do with kernel mode-setting: https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/AT ... _.28KMS.29

Saw this issue on an Ubuntu machine the other day, it's running 10.04 or .10 with a Via IGP and Ati 4550 PCIe, when I switched to the Ati in the bios and booted the cursor was a fuzzy block, now in Ubuntu (and maybe Debian?) sometimes switching to a VT and back from X resolves invisible/mis-rendered cursor issues. Not this time - hitting <Ctrl><Alt>+F1 caused kernel panic! This is likely due to the version of Radeon driver not well supporting the hardware, but I suspect there is more to it, most probably relating to framebuffer settings, but I don't know too much about this really...