On Fri, 29 May 2020 at 10:56, Michael Hennebry <hennebry@web.cs.ndsu.nodak.edu> wrote:

For whatever reason,
the persistent overlay does not work for me.

I can get to runlevel 3 with or without nomodeset.
With nomodeset,
telinit 5
brings me to 640x480 .
Without nomodeset, it fails:
the oh no screen rears its ugly head.

Is there something I can do at runlevel 3
to get a mode other than 640x480 ?

Have you tried the vga= kernel boot parameter? For Xwindows it would be good to get something other than VESA running, either i915 or by adding a graphics card.

Is there something that will change xrandr's
idea of the screen size?

I had a look at the dmesg log on an old system with Nvidia card. It was set to display

the startup messages, which were initially at low res then switched to the resolution of

the monitor. The switch appears to occur when dmesg reports that nouveau has started.

Have you looked in dmesg for any indication of why it doesn't load the i915 driver?

https://www.kernel.org/doc/html/latest/gpu/i915.html says: "The drm/i915 driver supports all (with the exception of some very early models) integrated GFX chipsets with both Intel display and rendering blocks." It is possible that your system is one of those "very early models", or that the kernel developers removed support for some not quite as early models. The driver also needs a .bin

firmware file. I have had problems with other hardware when upstream omitted the firmware files

needed by old hardware.

George N. White III