# flashing screen on boot [SOLVED]

## skwang

https://imagebin.ca/v/2lLRlMhJtSO3

The URL is a photo I took of the external monitor plugged into a gentoo computer. There is a weird flashing screen with garbage characters that appears upon boot. After a short while, the boot "finishes" and this screen disappears. Usually I have a working gentoo machine and there are no other (obvious) graphics problems.

I am running nvidia-driver v340.96, with an NVIDIA graphics card: NV GT 520. Kernel is 4.1.15-gentoo-r1 (older kernels have the same problem). Does anyone have any good idea how to debug this?

PS- the bright white circle in the middle is the flash from the camera.

Update: In the case where I bork the computer for some reason, the screen persists and never disappears. For example: I recently had some NFS problems. The computer is a mythtv front-end set to autostart mythfrontend. Since I had NFS problems mythtv could not start. Instead of dropping me into a virtual console the screen said in this garbage state. The computer is running; i.e., I could ssh into it to solve the NFS problem.Last edited by skwang on Sat Jun 25, 2016 5:01 pm; edited 2 times in total

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## Tony0945

The picture is blank for me, both on Palemoon and Firefox.

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## skwang

 *Tony0945 wrote:*   

> The picture is blank for me, both on Palemoon and Firefox.

 

Great, another situation where something works/doesn't work for me but no one else! Thanks for letting me know...

Let's try this URL:

http://enderqa.pairsite.com/images/od_screenprob.jpg. Regardless if you know what the problem is, please let me know if the URL works!

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## Logicien

Both url works for me with Seamonkey. The garbage seen come from the Linux video driver. Which video support, frambuffers have-you configure in the kernel and which one produce the garbage? As you should know, the Nvidia proprietary graphic video cards support do not like to be use with any kernel video support. I use Nouveau.

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## Tony0945

 *skwang wrote:*   

>  Regardless if you know what the problem is, please let me know if the URL works!

 

Yes, that one works. It looks like fragments of a webpage or a GUI opening screen.

Is it anything like what was there before rebooting? Perhaps a fragment of a Windows image? I suspect that something left in memory is coming up.

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## skwang

@Logicien Thanks for pointing me in the right direction. It was the frame buffer kernel settings. I followed the kernel setup at this forum post: https://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic-t-1013132.html. The kernel configs/settings that gave me trouble were (probably):

```

CONFIG_FB_VGA16=y

# CONFIG_FB_UVESA is not set

CONFIG_FB_VESA=y

```

I've disabled these lines:

```

# CONFIG_FB_VGA16 is not set

# CONFIG_FB_UVESA is not set

# CONFIG_FB_VESA is not set

```

There were a few other settings as well but I believe the problem is solved, and has been marked as such.

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