Hi, I'm trying to install gentoo on an old compaq presario 1640 laptop (after having been through vector linux, slackware, and libranet) with the hope that I can customize it to work well on the old hardware I have. Anyway, I started the installation but the screen size is about 5 lines to big i.e. at the bottom of my LCD is what was displayed 5 lines ago. I tried just doing a blind installation by following the directions but got frustrated by frequent mistypings.

I was wondering if there's any way to change the resolution (LCD = 800x600, i've heard that gentoo install resolution is higher) so that I can see all of the screen/terminal. Here's a visual discription of my problem:

. . .
cdimage root # ls
----------- this is the bottom of the LCD I can see everything above this line--------
cdimage root # cd ..
cdimage root # ls
cdimage root # ls
cdimage root # ls
cdimage root # ifconfig eth0 up <-this is the line I'm currently typing on


any help/commands would be greatly appreciated, I've tried googling it and searching support sites, no luck.

at the cd boot: prompt type:

gentoo nofb

this uses normal vga resolution

finally managed to fix the problem, unfortunately "gentoo nofb" didn't work but "gentoo vga=ask" allowed me to pick a resolution that worked. Thanks anyway bnice