User Feedback :: Video 'washed out' with VESA driver

I have an old 166Mhz laptop on which I instaled DSL. Problem is, when it starts up the X server, the display seems 'washed out', the colors are all wrong and almost unreadable. Playing around with the xsetup.sh script didn't produce any positive results. The fbdev driver doesn't work at all, only the VESA driver works but it produces these 'washed out' colors. I tried changing the color depth to no avail. When I exit the X Server (Cltrl-Alt-Backspace) the text mode display is completely unreadable and I have to shut it down with Ctrl-Alt-Del and reboot.

Are there any commandline parameters that can fix this?

NOTE: I've had Linux working on this laptop before, notably Corel Linux, which properly detected the videocard and used the correct driver. Can't DSL do the same?

How much memory you got? Have you tried with the noicons cheat code(dsl noicons)? How about more info on your vid card?

I got it to work correctly now by adding startup parameter:

fb800x600

But this only works in the interactive (LiveCD) setup. How do I make this permanent in my HD install?

Depends if you used grub or lilo.
Edit the corresponding menu.lst or lilo.conf and change the vga option to vga=788

original here.