My debian etch went funny the other day. everything works fine, but on powerdown the text messages are in a massive font, can only see the first few words of each line. everything else works as normal. also, when i change to another text-based tty the font is way too big. Not sure what i did to initiate the change. Any idea where to start?

I haven't seen that in Debian, but something similar happened with a laptop install I was attempting of Ubuntu. By default, Ubuntu has boot options for "quiet splash" in /boot/grub/menu.lst. This causes various problems, including the symptoms you describe on this one laptop.

To fix it, the first thing I do in Ubuntu is edit /boot/grub/menu.lst and remove the offending "quiet splash" options. And then, after Ubuntu installs its automatic updates and puts them back in, I remove them again. What a pain!

(Actually, I don't know whether it's "quiet" or "splash" which is the offending option. I have no use for either, so I just wipe them both out.)

Are you using any sort of graphical boot splash? What does your /boot/grub/menu.lst look like?

Hi, thanks for the response. been away for the weekend - i'll check what grub looks like.
on powerdown i saw one message flying past...
" apc (? or something similar) cannot find BIOS"
which reminded me, i updated my BIOS the other week. maybe there is a relation. cheers

Hi, I fixed the problem by adding to /boot/grub/menu.lst
vga=791 splash=silent apm=off acpi=force
not sure what all this does, but it fixed my problem. this post is now closed. Thanks to IsaacKuo