A little Gentoo help please

Hello all,

I have really done it now. I just did a fresh install of Gentoo on a box that I have so it could co-exist with Suse.

All went well. It runs. The dual boot part is OK.

Here is the *real* problem. When Gentoo boots up, the screen looks normal for a few seconds and the switches modes . I see a penguin at the top (that is ok, but not wanted) and the screen goes into 'bold mode' or some such. The white text is all bold and fuzzy. It looks like hell.

Please, any thoughts on this? Did I much up when I built the kernel and included some new 'frame buffer' deal??

Please, I want 'old-time' text on my monitor

In comp.os.linux.advocacy, Joe Potter

wrote on Tue, 25 Jun 2002 14:16:07 GMT

You'll probably get better responses in comp.os.linux.setup or comp.os.linux.misc, but I hate to see people deride [*] Linux for such a relatively minor problem, so...

Not knowing Gentoo, I can't be sure, but this sounds like some sort of console font problem. You might want to hunt around for a script containing 'consolechars'.

I've noticed this also with Debian (although I don't notice anything horribly fuzzy, but it is bold), and it appears to be changeable by editing /etc/console-tools/config and rebooting. There's probably a method to avoid rebooting (/etc/init.d/console-screen.sh reload?), though.

I'm going to have to play with it later on tonight. I can tweak it on one of my machines then to ensure it works for me.

Disclaimer: I have no idea whether this will work for you.

As for the penguin

Did you enable

support for frame buffer devices (EXPERIMENTAL)

in your kernel 'consol drivers' config?

If so, you may want to read that line again.

I would enable 'VGA text console' and 'video mode selection support' in the same place, but IANALGWCRTKCFM.

Then again, gentoo requires devfs which is also tagged experimental, so it could be just bad luck.

Damn. I did play with that.

Disable framebuffer mode in the kernel and see what that does...

Yep. If you see the penguin logo at the upper left corner of your screen, you've enabled console framebuffer support in the kernel.

Yes, after a bit of research and a hint from another here I went back and re-did the kernel. All is well now.

But, what the heck is the 'frame buffer' for anyway. Looks like hell on a ViewSonic E771.

Yes, like a morron I threw it in to see what would happen

In gentoo /etc/rc.conf is the place to look. I have:

CONSOLEFONT='default8x16'

which I find ok. The comments before that line:

# CONSOLEFONT specifies the default font that you'd like Linux to use on the # console. You can find a good selection of fonts in /usr/share/consolefonts; # you shouldn't specify the trailing '.psf.gz', just the font name below. # To use the default console font, comment out the CONSOLEFONT setting below. # This setting is used by the /etc/init.d/consolefont script (NOTE: if you do # not want to use it, run 'rc-update del consolefont' as root).

If you want the normal font just run rc-update del consolefont.

Hope that helps.

Hmm