How to change resolution in terminal mode
 

I installed FC4 on my crappy laptop so I had to forgo the X windows system. However, I notice that the display is only using 640x480 when my laptop supports upto 800x600. Does how I can change the display to use 800x600?

If you are using a framebuffer driver (as you likely should be for text mode on a notebook), you can append a vga= argument to the end of your kernel command line using lilo or grub. See their respective man pages for vga= values.

You can also look into setfont, if it is physically using the whole screen, but you want smaller text.

I've tried the vga= option but that just stretches the text it doesn't actually change the resolution. Basically, Linux is not currently using the entire screen space. I have "free space" around the screen. For example, when FC4 boots, the GRUB boot up screen which has a blue background has a thick black border around it since it's not using the entire screen. I hope that clears it up.

As others have advised use the option of adding vga=XXX to your kernel line. Here an example and a table to assist you;

kernel /vmlinuz-2.4.18-19.8.0 vga=773 ro root=LABEL=/

In the example the screen resolution will be at 1024x768x256colors or
128 cols + 48 lines. See the table below for other resolutions and color
depths. (Best viewed with a mono-space font)

Colors 640x480 800x600 1024x768 1280x1024

256 769 771 773 775

32k 784 787 790 793

64k 785 788 791 794

16M 786 789 792 795

Thanks a lot Lenard. Where did you get the numerical values from?

Got them from;

http://www.tldp.org/HOWTO/Framebuffer-HOWTO.html

and converted them from hex to decimal using kcalc with logic active, example;

0x300 = 773

Just set for Hex enter the value 300 the select Dec

I forget where I read that it OK to use decimal values instead of hex values, it's been a number of (4-5) years since I read that. I keep a short cheat sheet handy.