anacron, VGA text mode
Hi All,
I've just installed Debian in an old laptop and I'm very happy about it :-)
I have a couple of issues which are laptop related.
1. When anacron is started during boot up, it reports something like
"anacron: deferred while on battery power". The battery of this laptop was
removed years ago when it died and now it's always mains operated. It looks
to me like the laptop (a 100 MHz Pentium Toshiba Satellite) was not designed
to be operated with the battery removed, because I experience some other
minor funnies no matter the OS I boot, but anyway. Looks like the hardware
thinks it's running on batteries. I've been reading the man page for
anacron, looking for a switch to instruct anacron to execute jobs no matter
the power source but no joy. I've been suggested that this may be controlled
through some "power management software, APM or ACPI". What do you think?
2. When the laptop is powered up, it starts in a nice text mode where the
80x25 character matrix would take up the whole 800x600 LCD. If you boot any
OS that doesn't change the mode (like DOS or older versions of Debian I've
had in the past), it stays like that. Now that I've installed latest Debian
stable (3.0r2 if I remember well), Lilo appears in the nice text mode, but
as soon as Linux starts to boot, it switches to a different text mode
sporting this nice penguin holding a beer. Is this a kernel "feature"? This
new crap mode takes only part of my screen, leaving a big border unused.
Also, the penguin thing confuses applications like less and man, which fail
to handle it properly when you use page up / down: They try to use the upper
text lines, normally unused. (This penguin problem is not too bad. Since he
/ she seems to live in the first console only, I can just log in the second
console. The small screen is annoying, though.)
Thanks a lot!
Alex
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