Grayed out text on system console at boot
 

I've been looking for an answer to this question for a few weeks, and so finaly I think i can resort to that last shot and beg for help.

During the boot process of my Sarge (Debian) just before the daemons are begining to load, the color of the text of the system console goes from bright white to gray. This started happening since I upgraded to 2.6. I am currently on 2.6.6. I will prepare a detailed report on my system configuration and a print out of my boot messages very soon but for now I am kind of hoping that it will turn out to be something trivial. Thanks in advance :).

Did you enable framebuffer console support in the new kernel?

Solved
 

Now I have. That was the problem. I was wondering why did text go gray without support for the framebuffer device? Is it an error not to enable framebuffer support if it is available? Now I run into another problem playing with the fbset utility. I tried to fix the position of the viewable area of the text. But after the reboot the position of the text is again reset to the initial value. I realised that /etc/fb.modes is the database fbset uses but how do I tell the kernel in which mode to put the console initialy?

I don't know why your text went grey without fb... Guess it has something to do with the video card being put into another mode?
Not enabling fb support is certainly not an error; but without it you can only get the lower resolutions and frame rates in the console. It can be switched off because on other platforms (other than i386) it might not work at all...
And by the way, for using X11 it does not matter if you use it or not; only for the console.

What I do is give a boot parameter to the kernel; in my case it is "radeonfb:1280x1024@75" or something like that. You can configure Lilo/Grub to add that param automatically. Take a look at Documentation/kernel-parameters.txt in the kernel source tree for the correct option for your video card.

Another option would be to add the fbset command to the "runlevel-independant" boot script (I think in Debian it's /etc/init.d/localboot.sh -- I'm not sure)

Got it working all the way
 

Thanks nukkel! I've finally got it working all the way. All it needed was video=aty128fb:1280x1024 kernel parameter, just as you suggested. linuxquestions.org does its job again :).