Please help me understand if we have a bug, or a design change (if so, where is the documentation?).
The f8t1 LiveCD responds to an attempt to use the boot loader parameter vga=0x799 (via using the [TAB] key on the initial boot choice screen to edit the "Run from image" entry to add this parameter to the end of the:
vmlinuz initrd=initrd.img ro quiet root=CDLABEL=Fedora-8-Test-1-Live-i686 rootfstype=iso9660 liveimg
line) with: - - - Undefined video mode number 799 Press <ENTER> to see video modes available, <SPACE> to continue, or wait 30 sec [<ENTER> displays something similar to: ] Mode: COLS x ROWS 0 0F00 80 x 25 VGA 1 0F01 80 x 50 VGA 2 0F02 80 x 43 VGA 3 0F03 80 x 28 VGA 4 0F05 80 x 30 VGA 5 0F06 80 x 39 VGA 6 0F07 80 x 60 VGA [... selecting a choice to scan for additional modes merely made the screen flash for a couple of minutes, but no additional choices were displayed] - - -
Selecting one of the scrunched modes (e.g. 6) does pack more characters on the screen ... for a while; but by the time the boot messages were into the "SELinux ..." group, just before the "Interactive Startup" message, this VGA choice had evaporated and the usual smaller number of characters were being displayed on the screen
I appreciate the feedback, as that is better than the silent failures to change video modes I have witnessed with other recent Fedora media. But the choice of modes shown is quite different from those shown on e.g.: http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Fedora7/FAQ#head-1d333d02c2c2e2f3b06d18ce92d41... and other places VESA video modes (or VGA codes) are documented.
Bugzilla time? Or do others with different hardware find more constructive behavior from attempts to use this boot loader parameter vga=... ?
Cheers, Nelson
p.s. After installing the kernel-doc.noarch package, one can read in: /usr/share/doc/kernel-doc-2.6.22/Documentation/i386/boot.txt vga=<mode> <mode> here is either an integer (in C notation, either decimal, octal, or hexadecimal) or one of the strings "normal" (meaning 0xFFFF), "ext" (meaning 0xFFFE) or "ask" (meaning 0xFFFD). This value should be entered into the vid_mode field, as it is used by the kernel before the command line is parsed.