Hi again Julien, Everone else went home, so I have a chance to break things^W^W experiment. Upon re-booting and actually checking what resize and $LINES say when the X server hasn't messed things up, I find that I've mis-described this bug.
The normal state does in fact have 28 lines; when the X server starts up, something causes the console to be only able to display 25 of them; I think these are slightly taller, since they fill the same amount of screen. None the less, screen resizing via the hardware controls doesn't help. So something has changed the console - maybe its font ? Any idea how I can ask it about that ? So, sorry about having it partially back-to front; but the same consequences flow from it ! >> I'm guessing that if I run dpkg-reconfigure on the xserver package, >> it'll ask me to select a driver and I can change from vesa to i810. > > That, or replace vesa with i810 in /etc/X11/xorg.conf and restart X. I had to reboot anyway (to restore normal mode), so might as well use the brute force approach and let the system do any updates it deems prudent. This also meant that I saw that the part of the configuration which offered me a choice between using the frame buffer and not using it was set to not use it. I left it that way. Interestingly, the reconfigure has put my Modes lines into the usual order, with 1600x1200 first, and xdm has no problem starting up; so clearly whatever problem it was having (before I bodged the order as described previously) has been solved. >> Please suggest a command that'll reveal whether I have an fb console. > Maybe lsmod will show whether a fb driver is loaded. lsmod | grep fb yielded no output. The full output of lsmod contained 58 lines but I have no delusions of understanding it. Do you want to see it all ? lsmod | grep i810 yielded <quote> i810_audio 32916 0 ac97_codec 17196 1 i810_audio soundcore 9248 2 i810_audio,snd </quote> Rebooting without xdm (and confirming that I was still in normal mode), I logged in as a non-privileged user (me) and ran startx (with no args); it started up X just fine, and all my consoles went into "only displaying 25 lines" mode, as before. So your guess that xdm is not the culprit is vindicated. I'm now running (and was when testing startx) with <quote src="/etc/X11/xorg.conf"> Section "Device" Identifier "Intel Corporation 82915G/GV/910GL Integrated Graphics Controller" Driver "i810" BusID "PCI:0:2:0" EndSection </quote> and I still get the <quote src="/var/log/Xorg.0.log"> (++) using VT number 7 (WW) xf86OpenConsole: setpgid failed: Operation not permitted (WW) xf86OpenConsole: setsid failed: Operation not permitted </quote> which you deemed weird earlier. If you want full output from your earlier script, just ask and I can do that again. Eddy. -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]