As a student, I try to use my computer in text mode a lot more than GUI even though I'm only minoring in Comp. Sci., but recently after installing fglrx drivers from AMD, when my kernel loads all the text stays huge.

Before (or if I remove the drivers) the drivers, all the text would be huge for a bit, and then get smaller again to fit my screen. I preferred this over what I have now.

Because it is a proprietary driver, I'm not sure if I can even change anything to make the text small again, but Google showed no relevant results with "fglrx" "linux" "text" and I did a few searches including "console" in there as well.

I believe this is a Slackware issue, because I decided to try it out on a second hard drive except on Debian. It didn't get the problems with the fglrx drivers. I'm hoping someone has run into this problem (not in a good way) and could help me.

The open source radeon driver, which is used by default, supports kernel modesetting. This allows the kernel to switch to your monitors preferred resolution, even when not in X. The fglrx driver does not support KMS. You might be able to use the vesa framebuffer by passing the appropriate vga= line to the kernel via /etc/lilo.conf, but this can also cause conflicts with the fglrx driver and it is normally not advisable to have multiple drivers accessing a single piece of hardware at the same time.

Adam

Should I disable the open source radeon driver for this?

... You're using fglrx, which means the open source driver is already disabled...

Adam

Doesn't the kernel upload whatever drivers it has to support the computer on the first boot? I'm assuming that's what you're referencing about the open source drivers.

"VGA=791" is 1024x768 @ 16bpp which is the largest console screen I know of for LILO's boot options in Slackware. The console text shouldn't be too small but it won't be terribly large either.

Thank you Reaper, but is my understanding of the kernel incorrect from Post #3?

Actually, you're correct. The kernel does have it's own drivers for low-level hardware functions.

ReaperX7:
Oh, that's where I went wrong. Thank you, sorry for the confusion Adam. ^.^