On Tue, 15 Apr 2014 15:04:40 -0700, The Real Bev wrote:

I have two ATI Radeon graphics cards. I'm running linux with a 3.10.17
kernel. One graphics card is the MSI R5450, which has the HD5450
graphics processor. The other card is a Diamond HD6450 with the HD6450
processor. I boot with the nouveau driver installed. When I boot with
the MSI card everything is normal. The screen shows the progress of the
boot process, the screen blacks out when nouveau is installed and then
switches to tiny letters and everything is fine. If I start X I get a
good X display and when I shut it down I get the good console display as
previously.

When I boot with the Diamond card the boot process proceeds as before,
but after the screen blanks out and the nouveau driver is installed the
screen is filled with essentially random pixels under which there is the
faint suggestion that you can see actual text. I can log in and start
X. Under X the screen is a complete wash of random pixels, but I can
shut X down with control-alt-backspace, at which point the screen blacks
out for several seconds and then normal console text appears. Thereafter
I can start and stop X and get normal console displays as often as I
wish.

In other words, after starting and shutting down X the card behaves
perfectly normally. It's as if some setting of the card by the initial
load of nouveau is improper and is only corrected when X shuts down back
to a console.

Any suggestions about making this card behave normally?

mint 15 light weight desktop, not petra 16