Well, I still am going to be stubborn about this. X11 servers manage to drive the cards pretty extensively with no real trouble.
That is because the VGA BIOS has already been run during POST, before the kernel or the X11 server ever gets loaded into the machine.
Besides, recall on most motherboards with built-in-video: the video bios is in the nvram I just over-wrote with Linux. We have to figure this out. OpenBIOS is going to have to figure it out too, for the same reason, unless Open BIOS wants to be 1/2-Open. So let's work it out.
Talk to the XFree86 4.0 guys; they're tackling the problem right now because they want to handle multi-headed machines, and (except for certain double headed products from people like Matrox) only one card can occupy the legacy ISA address area so extra cards never have their VGA BIOS' run at all.
Todd Whitesel toddpw @ best.com - To unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@freiburg.linux.de with 'unsubscribe openbios' in the body of the message