I'm running Slackware 8.1 on an older Toshiba satellite 315CDT. When i start up the computer it shows all the writing flying across the screen i can see the little penguin icon in the top left but it never shows me the bottom of the screen. Once i log in to a GUI it goes to the proper resolution and every thing looks fine. so far all the reading I have done about resolution problems have only been talking about the resolution i the X11 windows system. I don't think that is what I'm looking for though. I'm not really even sure which files to start looking in, let alone what changes to make. if any one can point me in the right direction i would appreciate it. Its a major pane to hit the enter key 7 times to see if you made a spelling error or what response i get back from the commands i try to run.

Open up:

/etc/lilo.conf

And change the "vga=" line. The default Slackware LILO setup will have a helpful chart right in the file that will tell you what the different values represent.

I'm not sure if you want to raise or lower your resolution, since laptops can be a bit picky video wise, but a bit of experimenting will work everything out for you.

I had actually tried editing that file once already, but since it didn't change any thing the first time I decided it was best to leave alone until I knew for sure.
OK so I got tired of the guess and check method because nothing was working, and I'm inpatient. I went thru most of the choices, then I decided to run # liloconfig. go figure after reinstalling lilo it now works fine, I even got to tweak another choice I wanted to.
the setting that finally worked was framebuffer console @800x600x256 vga=771.
thanks for the help

Maybe this help.

After you edited lilo.conf, have you run /sbin/lilo ?
I had smiliar problem, edited the timeout, but it will not changed until I typed /sbin/lilo

Cheers.


Nevermind, didnt know you finally fixed the problem.

You know what i had not known that i had to run any thing after editing the file, i just kind of assumed after saving it it would work right the next time. So in the intrests of learning i decided to edit the file and then run the /sbin/lilo. Apon the next reboot my screen was messed up again, and one edit and reboot later it was working fine again. Thanks for the extra little info. I like knowing extra ways of doing things, especially if they are easier.

Yeah, I forgot to specify you needed to run /sbin/lilo.

Everybody forgets that when they start working with LILO (it would be nice if they put that in as a comment in the lilo.conf file, but whatever).

A week ago I picked up a 315cdt and installed linux on it. I didn't even realize I was missing the bottom and top of my terminal screen. Then browsing around the web I found your post. Changed my lilo.conf , executed lilo, and to my suprise found my terminal screen to be bigger. Thanks for the tip.

stonerfish