From Bugzilla Helper: User-Agent: Mozilla/4.76 [en] (X11; U; Linux 2.4.18-5 i586; Nav) Description of problem: When booting with either the installation cdrom, boot.img, boot.net or the final installed kernel, a graphical Redhat banner is displayed right after the kernel boots. Unfortunately, if the monitor on the machine doesn't support SVGA, right after the message "uncompressing linux... ok, booting the kernel", no further output is displayed. However, the machine does continue booting and is accessible over the network. During installation boots, the situation is not as bad, a monitor supporting 800x600 seems to be what is required. However, simple VGA shows the same problem: no console output after the kernel boot message. NOTE: This is not a LILO or grub problem, the banner is displayed while the kernel boots. Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable): How reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce: 1.Boot from cdrom 2. 3. Actual Results: "uncompressing linux... ok, booting kernel." is the last thing displayed when using a monochrome VGA (640x480 max) as the console. Additional info: I attempted to find a kernel parameter that would turn off the banner feature, I see nothing referenced anywhere in /usr/src/linux2.4/Documentation.
*sigh* Of course, right after I create a bug report, the solution is discovered, after working on it for a day already. Add vga=0x300 to the kernel parameters. This is supposed to specify 640x480 and 8 bit support, according to http://www.tldp.org/HOWTO/Framebuffer-HOWTO-5.html. Note that using "vga=ask" does not display the modes in this fasion, rather the resulting console sizes are shown, ie 80x25. The 80x25 mode does NOT work, but vga=0x300 does the job, even on the ancient Amdek 432N monochrome VGA I use for my server consoles. I do remember (whether I acually did or not I can't say) trying the nofb install option, which did not work. I just verified this, using 'nofb' when booting from the install cdrom does NOT work.
MISTAKE: Please note all references in my previous comments to 640x480 should be 640x400. Whoops.