Comment 6 for bug 66652

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Dylan McCall (dylanmccall) wrote :

I noticed something today after messing up xorg.conf!

Instead of being dumped into a terminal, the following occurred:
-I was given about 5 seconds of the described weird effect.

-Screen went blank for a moment (half a second?)
-I was then given more of that glitch, this time with a distinct greenish colour with some blue sparkles. This time it lasted about 3 seconds then jumped back to the blank screen and it all repeated infinitely.

At this point, I knew I had a lead. Then I tried something I rarely do: Ctrl+Alt+F5 (or whatever that combination is to switch to another virtual terminal). This brought me to the continual scrolling messy glitchy thing! (It's really quite simple, Watson).

As I recall, Ubuntu's startup / shutdown procedure is not quite seemless; at many instances, the terminal will pop up for a moment while something is sorted out. This is especially noticeable on a slower computer such as mine.
I also realized that, since I've been encountering this bug, I haven't seen much of that terminal...

Therefore, I suggest that this bug is actually the terminal not rendering correctly.

There seem to be a few exceptions, though:
When using Hibernate (my computer doesn't get powered off automatically, by the way), I am able to read quite clearly at the end of that process "Power down" on a text terminal.
Perhaps another process is interfering with the terminal when everything is loaded, thus causing this to not happen when everything is closed down?

More things I've noticed:
When I start up (and perhaps at other times), the artifacts seem to display bits and pieces from the Human theme, or perhaps the login screen being loaded. I will try to capture a video of this, though my eyes may just be deceiving me. The artifacts are definietly distinctly orange (most of the time) and may contain distinct images.
Perhaps this is all left over in VRAM.
Random question: Does anyone else here have a video card that uses shared RAM?

*Oops*
I guess this means I am confirming the above bug #63558

Also a suggestion: Since this bug is making it impossible to use virtual consoles for some users, thus rendering the system potentially very difficult to recover if something goes wrong, this bug should be considered slightly higher priority than a mere asthetic thing.

Finally, anyone in disagreement that this is a dupe of #63558 ?