Shortly after I made the switch from Windows 2K Pro to Slackware 10.0 on my Dell laptop, I started having a strange phenomena on the screen: on occasion, when I started the X server, I would get a screen full of multicolored blobs. No GUI, just a bizarre Lava Lamp effect that wouldn’t go away, even if I tried to restart X with Ctrl-Alt-Bksp or the whole system with Ctrl-Alt-Del.

I dealt with it for a while, but it only took about two days to drive me nuts. Because it never happened under Windows, I thought maybe I had a problem with my X configuration. Changes and fixes proved fruitless, and once or twice left me worse than before. I also thought maybe my broken pointer somehow threw something off, as when I did get X to work, my cursor had a mind of its own.

Then I found a reference to the Font feature on another of the Dell page of the Linux On Laptops site. The Font feature is essentially a zoom for text mode; if the resolution of the display is less than the native resolution of the screen, it blows up the display to fit. This, it turns out, is what causes the big Dell logo to fill the screen at boot.

When I disabled it, my terminal screen (the CLI, before starting X) only filled the center of the screen at 1024×768. I wouldn’t want to leave it like that for any length of time, but I only needed it long enough to startx (for some reason I prefer to keep 3 as my default runlevel) and maybe do a few other quick jobs from time to time.

From then on, X started correctly every time. No more colored blobs, no more lost GUI. I should also note that X starts up at the resolution designated in the config file (in my case 1280×1024) and still fills the screen. So, the Font feature is completely unnecessary. If I’m going to do work without X, the feature’s there if I need it, but for the most part, it’s useless.

Why does this happen? Beats me, but obviously the hardware and maybe the BIOS or firmware doesn’t like something it’s seeing and is going squirrely on me. But it’s fixed and I’m happy, so I don’t much care.