Simple and quick question:

What's the difference when you boot up and you can select either Linux or Linux-nonfb. I choose Linux-nonfb and I still boot into KDE and everything works normally. What's the difference?

I think fb is the frame buffer. With the frame buffer on, the boot up screen should have a higher resolution and more colors.

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Frame buffer mode, utilizes the vesa capabilities of your video card to display a graphic based console.

It does this however in a very rudimentary manner, where in the operating system writes to a "buffer" which is copied to video memory causing things to appear on the screen.

It is an unaccelerated mode.

However it has certain advantages especially with certain display types.

For instance, on my Laptop a normal text screen would be limited to 80x25 in a rather small window, prior to booting a gui.

In frame buffer mode, I can get this to change to 132x48 characters overlaying a nice Penguin faded logo.

This looks so much "cooler" and gives me a better picture as to what is happening during the startup process.

Furthermore when I switch out of Xwindows to a text console, I'm returned to the framebuffer screen.


Also some display adapters have a tendancy of "flashing" during the X-windows updates.

E.G. my Nvidia GoFX5700 128 Meg, on one of my Laptops...

Strangely if I utilize Framebuffer mode when booting, this never happens.

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