What is framebuffer mode, and why?

[dan@george]

I just finished my first Gentoo installation, and pretty much everything went smoothly. It was a stage 1 installation.

I'm confused, though, as to what framebuffer support is, what kinds of things need it, and whether I should be using it. I have an ATI Radeon 9800 Pro, and when I type "startx" at the command line right after booting up, I get the message "Cannot run in framebuffer mode." I know I compiled framebuffer support into the kernel, but the help section on that option was completely useless to me. It was a few pages describing what a framebuffer does, but it didn't give any suggestions about whether it was wise to include it, so I included it.

I'll try removing the VGA line from my grub.conf and see if it runs then. Any other suggestions or explanations?

[kkubasik]

The solution to your problem is video drivers. But Frambuffer support, i don't know the specifics of how it works, but I do know that it provides non-X support for simple graphics.

[dan@george]

Thanks qub, I'll download ATI's proprietary driver and see how that works out for me.

[mr_gary]

hi i had exactly this problem after installing the linux driver from the ati site, i looked in the list of files added in the rpm program and seen the file "fglrxconfig" in the /usr/X11R6/bin directory, i ran this and did the usual yes no 123 thing and tried to ran the x server with startx and all was well, even opengl screensavers yippie, lol, ,,,

hmmmm now 3d!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

[supertechguy]

Framebuffer is running your graphics directly from the kernel. The kernel must be compiled with the proper framebuffer drivers for your hardware. Otherwise it wont work. Sometimes framebuffering just doest work, about the only thing I use it for is servers without X.org, so that my console is a little better resolution, than the standard ugly huge font.

[jaboua]

And framebuffer is also good with links2 since you then can show graphics in links without running X

[Dragonstorm]

I just finished my first Gentoo installation, and pretty much everything went smoothly. It was a stage 1 installation.

I got the same problem, but I have NVIDIA GeForce card.
Well, the problem was solved by disabling vesafb in kernel.