Despite all the effort I put into SVGATextMode, and despite the huge efforts the XFree86 team put in their software, and despite the efforts of the SVGALIB coders, VGA stuff in Linux is still hazardous at best. You have probably encountered one of the following phenomena: - When switching consoles while XFree86 is just starting up sometimes messes up your screen for real. Only rebooting helps. - The same thing happens under SVGATextMode. - and under SVGALIB. - DOSEMU is another potential VGA-killer. - Worse even: when some (or all) of these VGA-aware programs are used together, even more trouble spawns. - When one of these programs crashes due to either a bug or an interaction-problem, it leaves your screen ... messed up. Only rebooting helps Have you noticed how many times it says "only rebooting helps"? Enter the GGI project... GGI is a kernel-level graphics subsystem that is intended to be the basis upon which all other graphics programs add their functionality. Because it is intended to be the only thing actually accessing VGA hardware, interaction problems between various graphics systems are eliminated. And because it is ALWAYS running, it is able to restore the screen from a crashed program without a glitch. In fact, once GGI is on your system, most (if not all) VGA-related reboots are history. GGI already has much of the functionality of SVGATextMode and SVGALIB (it already has an SVGALIB emulation library that runs most SVGALIB applications), and once they start porting XFree86 upon their code, those problems will be gone also (GGI already solves many of the XFree86 problems, because it will always return you to a working textmode screen when you need to). GGI is the VGA HAL (Hardware Abstraction Layer) for Linux. More information on GGI can be found here: - The November 1996 issue of Linux Journal (#31) - Andreas Beck's home page: http://www-public.rz.uni-duesseldorf.de/~becka/doc/scrdrv.html Steffen Seeger's home page: href="http://www.tu-chemnitz.de/~sse/scrdrv
