RobF
Group: Members
Posts: 22
Joined: July 2004 |
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Posted: Aug. 11 2004,20:41 |
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You can bypass the screen that's asking you to choose a video mode by booting into the framebuffer device.
On the Live CD, that's done by entering vga=normal (or any of the vga modes that your video card supports, e.g. vga=791) at the boot prompt, e.g. dsl vga=normal.
With DSL installed on the HDD, you can pass that boot option vga=... to the kernel by entering it in lilo.conf.
Open a root console and enter "nano /etc/lilo.conf". In the lilo.conf file, you'll see an entry or entries beginning with the line image=.... Identify the entry that belongs to the DSL partition (probably called dsl or debian_GNU). Using nano, between the lines label=..... and root=..... insert the line "vga=normal" (without the quotation marks), or any specific setting of vga=... that you've found suitable. Then hit CTRL-O, followed by CTRL-X. Run "more /etc/lilo.conf" to check whether lilo.conf has been properly written, and then run "lilo" from the command line. That will write the updated lilo configuration to the boot sector of your HDD; while doing that it will tell you which entries have been added.
Here is a sample of the entry for Feather Linux on my HDD:
| Code Sample | image=/disks/debian/boot/vmlinuz-2.4.26
label=Debian_GNU
vga=773
root=/dev/hdb10
initrd=/disks/debian/boot/initrd.gz
append="lang=us"
read-only |
It's easier to experiment with vga setting using the Live CD rather than the HDD install because the CD will pause at the boot: prompt where you can enter the vga=.... setting. A list of vga mode numbers is included below.
The next time you boot DSL that initial "select video mode" screen should be gone, you should see a little penguin in the upper left corner (indicating that you are running a framebuffer) and the console text might be smaller and have a higher res.
If you are still presented with the X Setup screens, you can then either run Xvesa (and choose your resolution from the screen) or stick with Xfbdev. If you choose Xfbdev, then the desired resolution has already been set through the vga=... setting implemented right at the beginning of the boot sequence.
If you don't get the Xsetup screens (I believe as of v. 0.7.3, DSL automatically boots into an enhanced desktop with Xvesa at 1024x768x32, bypassing those screens), then there is the boot option (aka cheatcode) "dsl xsetup" that allows you to disable that autobootup sequence.
For DSL installed on the HDD, you can pass that boot option to the kernel by putting it in an append line in lilo.conf. Again, open a root console, enter "nano /etc/lilo.conf", go to the image=.... entry for DSL and look if there is a line beginning with append=... If there isn't, insert one (see the above sample). The format for append is:
append="boot_option_1 boot_option_2 boot_option_3"
You can include as many cheatcodes as you want. An example: append="lang=us xsetup noicons"
Then save the modified lilo.conf and run "lilo" again to update the lilo configuration. The new setting will be implemented on the next bootup which I would suppose will guide you through the XSetup screens to the standard desktop. To get to the enhanced desktop with icons, click on the "Enhanced desktop" option which I believe is in the Configuration menu.
If you don't get icons then you've got the same problem that I have - I've never seen icons in one month of use of DSL. That may be a bug.
Good luck.
Robert
P.S. A list of vga mode numbers follows. This is a document included with Feather Linux. Note that DSL doesn't provide the utility fbset.
Changing the XFbdev resolution
==============================
XFbdev uses the framebuffer device which is activated at boot time. In order
to change the framebuffer settings, you need to exit X and use a tool called
fbset.
Then merely restart X. If you want to set the resolution during bootup,
you need to enter the correct cheatcode. To set the resolution to 800x600,
you would type "dsl vga=788" for instance. Here are some of the codes:
640x480 - 256 colours: 769
640x480 - 32,768 colours: 784
640x480 - 65,536 colours: 785
640x480 - 16.8M colours: 786
800x600 - 256 colours: 771
800x600 - 32,768 colours: 787
800x600 - 65,536 colours: 788
800x600 - 16.8M colours: 789
1024x768 - 256 colours: 773
1024x768 - 32,768 colours: 790
1024x768 - 65,536 colours: 791 (default)
1024x768 - 16.8M colours: 792
1280x1024 - 256 colours: 775
1280x1024 - 32,768 colours: 793
1280x1024 - 65,536 colours: 794
1280x1024 - 16.8M colours: 795
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