My first question on this forum (and definitely not the last....)

I have an AST Ascentia M series laptop running Red Hat 7.0 (enigma) with XFree86 4.2 (I think). Xconfigurator never seemed to work correctly with the graphics chipset (Cirrus GLD 7555 2Mb video ram) until I discovered from another site that by passing the parameter "vga=791" to activate the framebuffer thingy at the LILO prompt the chipset works great. I also get the funky penguin whilst booting .

My problem is this. I want to pass this parameter to the kernel automatically so I don't have to do ctrl-x and manually enter "vga=791" every time I start up the laptop. I have added the following line in various places of lilo.conf :

append="vga=791"

and it doesn't work anywhere. I tried at the start as a global parameter and also just after the 'linux' line too but to no avail.

(Before anyone says, yes I did run the 'lilo' command afterwards )

Any ideas?

Incidentally I did the same on my Red Hat 9 box with no problems. Just added it at the end of the linux line in /boot/grub/grub.conf with no problems.

I don't know if this causing the problem, but try it as a bare
vga = 791
instead of an append. Plus, the fine manual says it won't work if you've already got an append line, such as scsi-emulation and you add a second append - you have to put all appends on one line.

(This is assuming it works in the first place which, based on your post, it does. My i810e on the Celeron doesn't like any of those options.)

Hmmmm. Seems I was too quick to assume 'vga' was a kernel parmeter. Reading the man pages it does seem as if vga=791 should be on it's own as it seems to actually be a lilo parameter. I'll try that when I get home tonight.....

Serves me right for missing out one of the best sources of info in Linux, the man pages......doh.

Oh, and my box at work (with an i810) doesn't work any of those settings either .......

EDIT

Yup. By adding just :

vga=791

to lilo.conf it now works.

Next time i'll RTFM......