Toshiba laptop display probs 4852

On Thursday 22 September 2005 18:43, rr2 stood up and spoke the following words to the mbuttes incomp.os.linux.misc...:

This is normal, or at least I think it is. I have a Toshiba Satellite and it also displays text mode with a large black border around the actual output window.

That is the XFree86 *mouse* *cursor,* and the white-ish screen you see is the XFree86 start-up background. ;-)

That's strange, as mine starts up KDE automatically. You do however have to give it some time, especially since Toshiba laptops - or at least mine does - tend to default to using the powersaving settings, i.e. the CPU will drop to a lower clock frequency.

If you've got very little RAM in that box - I have 128 MB in it myself - it tends to get really slow then. Pressing *Fn+F2* on my laptop seems to throttle it to the full 1 GHz again, which noticeably speeds up things, although it's still sluggish due to the low amount of RAM.

I believe this has to do with a bug in the hardware of the Toshiba video adapter. In my laptop, the video adapter uses 16 MB of shared memory - I don't remember what type it is, but it's something exotic - and I too have had moments where the screen seems to be frozen, although the system generally does still respond, e.g. tosshlogins.

The only trick to undo that frozen screen is then to reboot the system.

The logout can also create that white-ish screen, so that is normal. The freeze isn't, or at least, it may be normal for Toshiba but it's certainly undesired behavior.

I've actually experienced it with and without framebuffer support in the kernel, so I would rather believe that it's a typical Toshiba quirk. You have it and I have it, and possibly others have it as well...

Just my two cents... ;-)

-- With kind regards,

*Aragorn* (Registered Gnu-Linux user #223157)