So, here's my problem. I want to create two ways of using my FC5 laptop.

A) Traditional, boot into Gnome, work in desktop.
B) Fast, when I need to do something particular, and quickly.

My idea is to find console versions of as many gui apps as I can, and I would love two programs in particular - mplayer and fbi. MPlayer we all know and love, and fbi is a framebuffer image viewer.

The trouble is, I can't seem to detect that I even have a framebuffer. Mplayer complains "Error opening/initializing selected video_out (-vo) device" when I give it "mplayer -vo fb movie.mpg". fbi complains with a comment about not finding /dev/fb0.

Checking in /dev I find no fb0 nor fb(any number). Googling leads me to believe that framebuffers may be influenced by how you configure your kernel, but I have not had much sucess using non-Fedora kernels.

What do I need to do to use the framebuffer? What else do you need to know?

perhaps I should add that I am using an ATI raedon card in said computer, but I'm not using their drivers, because I'm using Fedora 5 x86_64, and they don't offer 64 bit drivers. Could this cause it? I suppose the framebuffer must work, because I have full graphical boot, I just can't seem to make it accessible to my applications.

I was coincidentally looking around my sysconfig due to another problem and noticed that the atiraedon framebuffer driver was blacklisted. Could this cause the problem? I'll try un-blacklisting it.

Alas, unblacklisting and modprobing does not work. Nor does unblacklisting and rebooting to let udev catch it. Hrm.

Update: no change to the problem, except that I have gotten ATI drivers, so it can't be that.