Maybe I'm confused and I'm thinking of something completely different. But when I use the default 2.4.33.3 kernel I get a terminal that is "high res" with a neat little penguin at the top but with 2.6.19.1 I can only get the 80x25 or 80x50 or whatever terminal. I want the high res cause 80x50 is just too confining and looks ugly. I am under the impression that the configuration for this is in device drivers>graphics support in make menuconfig. And I as far as I can see I enabled everything I'm supposed to.

enable firmware EDID
support for frame buffer devices
enable tile blitting support
VGA 16 color graphics support (M)
VESA VGA graphics support
nvidia framebuffer support (M)
nvidia riva support (M)

enable scrollback buffer in system RAM (256KB)
video mode selection support
framebuffer console support (M)

Am I missing something? OH... When I do set vga = 773 after I select the kernel in lilo I get a little prompt saying something about the BIOS and then a string of periods... then the screen tries to switch resolutions, but then I just get a blank screen as though it's getting a signal but no input to output(I hope that made sense) and the hard drive activity light blinks as if it's loading slackware fine but that doesn't do me any good if I can't see anything.

Hmm. Is there a vesafb-tng option in there somewhere? that is the thing you have to turn on. I think you have to turn off regular vesa to get vesa tng.

I don't see any options for a vesafb-tng. Would tile blitting have anything to do with this?

Oh, wait... the problem is that nvidiafb is not loading... anyway to manual set the resolution once linux has loaded?

hmm.. tooling with fbset,(fbset 1280x1024-60) I get this screen that's all static like a broken TV signal.

This is actually just a guess, so sorry if I'm incorrect.

It seems like framebuffer support needs to be staticly compiled since this is needed before the hard disks are mounted. Unless you are using an initrd, there is no way to load those modules in the initial boot process.

Best regards,
...drkstr

omg! That was it! Thanks

dm it... now it cuts off as if it was 640x480

Like, I have it set at 1024x768. But when I type a long command, it carriage returns to the same line and over writes the prompt... like:
or so... if you understand what I mean... I'm thinking I might have to set it to boot at 1024x768? Instead of doing fbset 1024x768-60?

I am not sure what fbset is, never had to use it. What option are you using in the lilo.conf? Usually all you need to do is use the appropriate vga setting by uncomenting the desired line. But since you said it "cuts off", I'm assuming the problem is more then just using the right lilo setting? I guess I do not fully understand what you are wanting to happen, and what it is doing instead.

If editing the lilo.conf does not help, could you clarify the problem a bit?

...drkstr

OK, success at last. I finally gave up fiddling with the nvidiafb in the kernel, removed it from the kernel and used the official nvidia drivers instead. (I figure it's best this way anyway in case I want to ever set up fluxbox or something) I set up initrd with the instructions in /boot/README.initrd but I did:

mkinitrd -c -k 2.6.19.1 -m nvidia -f ext3 -r /dev/md1

Edited lilo.conf and now I got 1024x768 res terminal with two little penguins on the top.

Thanks for everyones help.

{Oh and in case you haven't figured out already fbset manually sets the framebuffer on the fly... kind of works... though I was probably using it wrong)

vesafb-tng is a patch that has to be specifically applied to your kernel — only some distros (such as gentoo) have it in their vendor kernel.