Comment 180 for bug 129910

@angel1127

Vesa is a videocard independant standard to access higher resolutions than standard vga (640x480x16).
Almost any recent videocard supports this.
You can read what vesa is here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VESA_BIOS_Extensions

$kernel-source/Documentation/fb/vesafb.txt is correct in that Intel chipsets can use it.
But it is not intel-specific-- it's generic.
It's also loaded on my nVidia MX440 machine.

The problem with Gutsy is that vesafb does not load even if you unblacklist it in /etc/modules.d/blacklist.framebuffer in the initramfs.
That's why my script makes it load unconditionally by patching the script in /scripts/top.../framebuffer
(ugly hack, i know)

An other problem is that many people mistake the loading of vesafb for the console (tty) with the loading of the driver X uses for the GUI.
Yet another problem is that there can be interference between vesafb and the (accelerated) driver loaded by X.
Regarding color-depth.

Using vga=792 uses a 24bpp color-depth for the console which could be problematic with X.
But, why use such a color-depth for a console? It only makes it slower.
And the GUI uses the driver specified in /etc/X11/xorg.conf.

Anyway,

This problem has been in the beta-versions of gutsy and it has not been fixed for the general release.
That's not good.
I can imagine people to bark at upgrading to gutsy, or new people installing it freshly, to get "pissed off" by not having Ctrl-Alt-Fn working.

I wrote this script as a one-run solution to this problem and I know it's not a pretty one.
But my aim is to provide an answer that works for people having this problem.
I've got some valuable feedback on this script which I incorporated in it.

What I would like is a script that solves this issue for anyone installing gutsy or upgrading to it.
For as long as it's needed. (until a kernel-upgrade finally fixes this quirk)

Thank you for reply angel1127, and please keep me sharp :-)

IB