Pat,

I obviously missed seeing that vga=normal was the default. Framebuffers worked before this on this laptop so there was no need for me to disable them. Since there's no benefit to using them other than seeing the number of cores in the CPU (which I know without having to count penguins) there's no need to make further changes.

Again, thanks very much for pointing me to the solution,

Rich

I had the same error as you today, rshepard. After recompiling and installing a wifidriver (don't ask) on kernel 3.8.4 my pc went full retard.
I fixed it with a chroot into my installation, which is a pain in the ass with a lot of subvolumes on an encrypted btrfs system, and installed the 3.8.5 kernel.

The new kernel wasn't the fix, it was my i915 kernel module that was blown away by a wifidriver (yeah, I know... never just press enter on nightly builds).
I wansnt able to find the module anywhere, and before my experiment with the driver everything worked perfect.
After I got that module going again my problems were gone. Now everything is back to normal and I think its time for a rescue kernel with its own modules and initrd.gz.

I hope that helps and you get your fb console back.

Actually, not at all the same problem. On my laptop the Intel i915 module is present and loads just fine. It was a frame buffer issue and fixed by turning off frame buffers in /etc/lilo.conf.

Rich