I have recently been trying to get a good console web browser working on my Raspberry Pi (running Raspbian Wheezy, a slimmed-down ARM11/ARMv6hf version of Debian Wheezy)so that I don't have to log into X everytime I want to open a local html document (a reference manual for a different program). I ran across this wonderful little console browser called links (links2 package in the Debian repository). I also found out that links2 should offer some basic graphical browsing from console in graphical mode (-g) using ncurses. The console mode for links2 works great (in fact, I posted an earlier post on the Raspberry Pi forums without even starting X)however, I can't seem to get this graphical mode to work in the console, even though it works fine in X. It should be able to work using x, fb, directfb, svgalib, pmshell, or atheos. Running it with fb (frame buffer) or directfb returns an error explaining that it cannot find /dev/fb0. Running it with svgalib goes to a blank screen that I can't get out of, short of a hard reboot. I had the exact same results when trying this on my HP laptop running Debian 6.0.6 (Squeeze) x64. Something told me this might not be a problem with links2, but instead a problem with svgalib.

This was confirmed when I tried to run a different program (luxman, a pacman clone) on the console (no X) and got the same blank screen of death (luxman also uses svgalib).

So my question is this:

What do I do about a blank screen resulting when running graphical non-X console programs that use svgalib on both Debian 6.0.6 (Squeeze) x64 and Raspbian Wheezy ARM11/ARMv6hf?