It seems I am lucky enough to own the notoriously difficult Dell Inspiron 2600 and to need an operating system for it.

I installed Gentoo, and everything is working fine, it boots, I can log in, reboot, shut it down, etc. But for one thing: as soon as the kernel tries to set its own resolution/fonts for the console, I can see the screen reset itself and then I have a completely blank screen.

I realize that this has something to do with the Intel i830 chipset in the thing, and I have tried including both the i810 driver, and a generic i8xx/i9xx driver that are options with Gentoo both compiled into the kernel and as modules, all with the same issues.

I've successfully gotten DSL installed on this machine, and then Gentoo liveboot CD works, both of them just stop on boot and complain about the video mode number 317 being passed by the video card, but they will allow me to specify a video mode, or simply just default to VGA.

Is there a command I can specify on boot to make the kernel simply use VGA mode on boot?

I did a little bit more investigating, and it appears that the kernel is trying to go into framebuffer mode rather than just use straight VGA. I remember once seeing in the kernel configuration menu an option where you could set your kernel console screen resolution.

Hooking up an external display shows 720*400 (IE normal VGA), however when the screen updates and goes blank, the display reports it's receiving 128081024 resolution, but I believe the chipset in this laptop won't support anything over 1024*768. I've tried passing "vga=" boot arguments in my lilo.conf file, however with no success. I've also poked around the kernel's config menu without finding the option.

Do any Gentoo users know how to force the kernel to just use normal VGA mode for the console text?