peculiar console video behavior on edgy

[Felix Miata]

I've been trying to get edgy installed for nearly a week, using a lot of
different hardware (all with i440BX chipsets) to figure out some root of the
wide variety of failures. In the process I've discovered several zillion
ways to fail that I never before imagined, particularly having had such good
success with other debian installs, including breezy and dapper, both before
and after their release.

Finally late last night with an ATI card I got an install to finish without
errors, though in text mode. I used something like the following on the
kernel line to get there:

vga=normal ide=nodma pci=noacpi noapic noloapic nousb nopcmcia

Now on first boot I appended vga=ask, and selected 122 from the scan result.
On breezy on the same system this gives something like 100 columns by 37 or
40 lines on the console. On this boot, I got the same mode initally, but
then shortly before init finished, it switched into whatever mode the text
installer uses by default, which looks like some kind of graphics mode text
emulation that's much less attractive and less bold than 122 was initially
and is on breezy.

Between the time of mode switch and completion of init, line lengths got
messed up, and the [ ok ] 's that should be near the right edge of the
screen are displaying about 20-25% of the screen width away from the right
edge, and output messages (e.g. * Running local boot scripts
(/etc/rc.local)) that should not need to wrap are wrapping because they are
starting (down and) to the right of the [ ok ] 's.

When init got done I didn't even realize it, because there was no login
prompt, only a bunch of disk activity to listen to. Only when I switched to
another tty did I find a login prompt. On tty1 I only got a login prompt
after hitting <enter>.

Anyone know what happened, or how to get my vga=0x122 mode back like breezy?
-- 
"The Lord is my strength and my shield; my heart trusts in him,
and I am helped."				Psalm 28:7 NIV

 Team OS/2 ** Reg. Linux User #211409

Felix Miata  ***  http://mrmazda.no-ip.com/