[vox-tech] Laptop Console Display Question

[Daniel Hurt]

Greetings,

I am a relatively marginal Linux user and have only used it when 
necessary.  Recently however, I started looking to use it as my primary 
desktop environment and so I installed it on my Dell Inspiron 2600 
Laptop.  I have chosen to install Gentoo UNIX.  I went through quit a few 
distributions to get here, but I have been very happy with it on my 
desktop, however I have been having some trouble with it. A friend of 
mine, Peter Salzman recommended that I give my problem a shot here.

The problem that I am having is that the console display is stuck in 
640x480 mode on the 1024x768 display.  I would really like to either get 
the console to display the full resolution or just have the 640x480 cover 
the entire screen.  I have tried getting XFree going on it, but from what 
I have read the driver support is sketchy at best and so I would like to 
avoid that.

So, now onto the solutions that I have tried.  First, I tried using the 
frame buffer support to force a different VGA mode from the boot up.  This 
did not produce any satisfactory results. I have gone through the 
tutorials and tried several different kernel distributions and have not 
gotten far at all. As some of the tutorials regarding this type of laptop 
have suggested I updated the BIOS to the latest version. Then, I attempted 
to set my laptop to a higher resolution than the 640x400 setting that it 
is now. The problem is, right after the grub/lilo (I have tried both) boot 
screen pops up (working fine in full screen) and it selects the VGA mode 
to go into, no matter what is selected it goes to 640x400 in a small box. 
I believe the frame buffer is working because I get the tux penguin to 
display on the boot screen, but it is very pixilated and the colors are 
all wrong. 

I have tried using the VGA console driver and then I have also tried using 
the experimental support for the Intel 830 Console Driver Support in the 
2.4.21 Vanilla Kernel. 

My Lilo.conf Contains the following code: 
lba32 
boot = /dev/hda 
map = /boot/.map 
install = /boot/boot-text.b    
menu-scheme=Wb 
prompt 
timeout=150 
default=Gentoo 

#No Frame Buffer 
image = /boot/bzImage 
        root = /dev/hda3 
        label = Gentoo 
        read-only 

#Frame Buffer with VGA Drivers 
image = /boot/vmlinuz 
        read-only 
        label = Test1 
        vga = 791 
        root = /dev/hda3 
        initrd=/boot/initrd 

#Frame Buffer with Intel 830 
image = /boot/vmlinuz.new 
        read-only 
        label = Testing 
        root = /dev/hda3 
        append="video=vga16:off" 
        vga=0x305 
        initrd=/boot/initrd 

The next solution that I tried was trying to get SVGATextMode without 
frame buffering going. I downloaded the sources, but was not able to get 
them to compile on my machine. I am getting this error. 

cfgfile.y: At top level: 
cfgfile.y:269: parse error before '*' token 
cfgfile.y:269: warning: type defaults to `int' in declaration of `yyin' 
cfgfile.y:269: warning: data definition has no type or storage class 
make[1]: *** [y.tab.o] Error 1 
make[1]: Leaving directory `/home/ender/SVGATextMode-1.10' 
make: *** [bininstall] Error 2 

I then tried to get the new ebuild-beta patch which can be found 
here:http://bugs.gentoo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=19485 working but was not able 
to either. 

I do not really need a higher resolution display right now (would be nice) 
but the main thing that I would like is the console displayed full screen. 
Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.