[ltp] Screen resolution and console fonts for T23 1400x1050

[John Shane]

I have a T23 (2647-9SU) with a 1400x1050 screen and am having a
difficult time getting a nice looking text console.  If I leave "LCD
Horizontal/Vertical expansion" off in the BIOS the console is just a
tiny area in the center of the screen.  If I enable expansion then
the fonts are larger and use more of the screen but they are chunky
and ugly.  I am using the Arch 2.6.16-beyond kernel with vesafb-tng
and have video=vesafb,1400x1050-16@60 on the boot command line but
the fonts in the text console still look bad. Maybe 1400x1050 isn't a
valid vesa resolution, even with vesafb-tng. I haven't yet found a
list of valid settings under vesafb-tng. I have also tried different
fonts such as terminal with ConsoleFont=ter-v20n.psf.gz in rc.conf.
Still looks ugly--some parts of the font skinny and some thick and the
curves are blocky. 

Is this simply a hardware issue related to the BIOS expanded screen
or is there a way to use the whole display and still make the console
fonts smooth? Thanks for any suggestions.  John

I did read on ThinkWiki that "Suspend-to-RAM ... does not work
properly if the framebuffer is enabled. Suspending with X running is
fine, so long as the framebuffer is disabled and X is using its own
savage driver."  So it might all be a moot point since getting acpi
and suspend working is my next project and maybe I just need to forget
a decent text console and be satisfied with great terminals under X. 

Meanwhile xorg and xfce4 are behaving very nicely and I have a
beautiful X display.  Thanks to Bret Waldow and the thread
about skinny fonts and non-aliased fonts on this list recently. ;-)