I have always chosen "vga = normal" in my lilo.conf file so that I can see what is on the screen when I am in runlevel 1 or 3.

Having just upgraded to 13.37 on my laptop, I suddenly find that this "default" is being overridden somewhere and the typing on the screen is half its default size (80 x 25). Luckily, this hasn't extended to the typing I see when I run a console program like "terminal" (although the font appears a little more "fragile").

Is there a way I can make "vga = normal" the default in 13.37?

add "video=800x600" to the append line.

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The issue is KMS (Kernel Mode Setting). In the initial start of lilo it's using what you've told it to use. Once it detects (via the loading of the video driver) what the video card can do, it selects an appropriate resolution for the card and monitor.

You need to either disable KMS, or tell KMS what resolution you want to have.

The info from the previous poster to set the "video" parameter in lilo is exactly that; a line to instruct the kernel as to what resolution to use once the video card's framebuffer driver has been loaded.

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This has been my experience as well with KMS. It is the same with Ubuntu and Zenwalk as well.
Do you know why KMS defaults to such "teensy weensy writing" by default?

It defaults to whatever the preferred mode your monitor tells it to use (for flat screen monitors, it should be the "native" resolution). For CRTs, it's probably the maximum your monitor supports.

Adam

If you have Nvidia graphics, you can just boot with "nomodeset" to disable KMS (or switch to the proprietary driver, which doesn't support KMS)

Intel and ATI need KMS enabled for X to work

PirateSmack, "nomodeset" doesn't work with Nouveau, at least not with my laptop. I've personally had nothing but problems with KMS and this issue, and all the newest video drivers rely on it. I'm thinking about posting a bug on their Bugzilla about it, and at least one person has told me to do so. In any case, I'm going to the proprietary blob until Slackware 14.x.

I also previously created a thread about these problems, here it is:

http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...ouveau-880239/

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Thanks, I didn't know nouveau also requires KMS now.

This will only take you so far, but you could run setconsolefont and select a larger font.

I've had KMS-related problems with my laptop's ATI chipset as detailed in another thread. I have to disable KMS so that the laptop will resume from sleep/hibernate, but that causes other problems too. I've done a ton of Googling on this at it seems that KMS is in the "very big pain in the kiester" stage right now.

Whereabouts in lilo.conf does this line go?

BTW I tested some of the other "vga=" options in lilo.conf and still got teensy weensy writing. It looks like the 2.6.37 kernel has rendered that whole section of lilo.conf obsolete. Is this also the case with grub?

In the "append" line.

On video cards that now default to KMS (which is all intels, radeons, and nvidia GPUs), that is pretty much true.

It has nothing to do with the bootloader and is completely due to the video divers in the kernel, so grub isn't going to do anything different.

Adam

Well I found the line append=" vt.default_utf8=0"and changed it to
append=" vt.default_utf8=0, video=640x480" (the only way that LILO would accept it).

Guess how much difference it made to the font size?

You should not use a comma.

Adam

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Finally! Almost back to a normal screen (a very slight font change is noticable during booting).

That solves my immediate problem but I am a little reluctant to mark this thread solved yet. If the boot loader passes a parameter to the kernel and the kernel "forgets" about it then I would classify that as a BUG.

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