Re: [gentoo-user] Re: Any way to get real text console without killing X capability?

[Mick]

On Saturday 05 February 2011 15:27:27 Walter Dnes wrote:
> On Thu, Feb 03, 2011 at 04:05:01PM -0800, walt wrote
>
> > On 02/03/2011 02:11 PM, Nikos Chantziaras wrote:
> > > On 02/03/2011 08:07 AM, Walter Dnes wrote:
> > >> Is there a way to have a real text console? I know that I can
> > >> have 2 X sessions on tty10 and tty11 with different resolutions, and
> > >> colour depths. Is there a way to set tty1..tty9 to 640x480 *IN TEXT
> > >> MODE*, so that lat1-?? fonts would look normal, without killing the
> > >> ability to have X run at 1920x1200?
> > >
> > > Note that the suggestion the others gave about disabling KMS is
> > > probably
> > >
> > >not what you need. Disabling KMS means that it will also be disabled for
> > >X11, not only for the framebuffer. As you can imagine this is a bad
> > >thing.
> >
> > I'm aware of KMS because of my experiments with the 'nouveau' driver, but
> > I still have no idea what KMS really does.
> >
> > In other words, I *cannot* imagine why disabling KMS is a bad thing, but
> > I would very much like to know :)
>
>   Walt, Alan, Enrico, Nikos see the thread "Not getting video hardware
> acceleration" that I started on January 31.  Without KMS, and the
> resulting DRI2 acceleration, my laptop could not run mplayer fast enough
> to keep up with an HDTV feed.  With KMS, which is required by the bibary
> blob in the new Radeon driver, it works fine.  The documentation at
> http://www.gentoo.org/doc/en/xorg-config.xml requires KMS for newer ATI
> Radeon cards.
>
>   In "make menuconfig", I do not have any drivers enabled under...
>     Device Drivers  --->
>       Graphics support  --->
>       -*- Support for frame buffer devices  --->
> but I still have /dev/fb0 show up.  Under...
>       Console display driver support  --->
> the line...
>       -*- Framebuffer Console support
> indicates that framebuffer console support is enabled, whether I like it
> or not.  This is part and parcel of the ARI Radeon driver.  Without it,
> no X.

Right, but a framebuffer (KMS driven or vesa, et al.) is not a bad thing.  
Just try video=1024x768 (or whatever your desired resolution is) on the kernel 
line and it should just work.
-- 
Regards,
Mick