After more investigation I believe this is an xorg problem with the radeon driver. I'm posting the text present in the xorg bug report since I found a tempoary workaround. I believe at this time this bug report against 2.6.22-14 can be closed as it appears not related at all to #129910.
Whenever I switch to a vt terminal my display goes white. The display appears uninitialized as the color slowly fades, starting in the middle, until the whole screen is white. When I switch back to the X server everything is fine and the display comes back, until I do a vt switch again. The actual terminals are responsive so I can login blind and it works. Workarounds: I found this by chance. If I use the radeontool command and do a sudo radeontool light off sudo radeontool light on the display comes back and everything looks fine. So now, before I need to switch to a terminal I run this in an X term, then switch: sleep 5 && sudo radeontool light off && sleep 5 && sudo radoentool light on Another workaround I found is that if I plug in an external monitor and direct X on to that, I can do a VT switch without this issue. The external monitor goes blank and the console appears on the laptop. This started with my gutsy upgrade to xorg 1.3.0. I have a "ATI Technologies Inc Radeon R250 [Mobility FireGL 9000]" running the opensource radeon driver. Module radeon: vendor="X.Org Foundation" compiled for 1.3.0, module version = 4.3.0 01:00.0 VGA compatible controller: ATI Technologies Inc Radeon RV250 [Mobility FireGL 9000] (rev 02) -- No TTY access, not using framebuffer https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/156726 You received this bug notification because you are a member of Ubuntu Bugs, which is the bug contact for Ubuntu. -- ubuntu-bugs mailing list ubuntu-bugs@lists.ubuntu.com https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-bugs