nouveau driver vs nouveau.modeset=
 

My ancient laptop (which I can't afford to upgrade) has nVidia gt218m aka nvs3100m video. As it says on the left side of the screen, I am using slackware64-15.0

The "nvidia" xorg proprietary driver spent over 3 hours make-ing without producing any output file, until I gave up and hit ctrl-c.

The "nv" xorg driver included with the install - X loads but gives me only a black screen, requiring me to kill the xorg process to halt it. Though the log file in /var/log says everything loaded successfully.

The "nouveau" xorg driver works great. Except that I can not put "nouveau.modeset=0" in the kernel boot command line, or else X fails to load, saying "connection refused".

But if I do not put "nouveau.modeset=0" then half way through the boot the screen turns to little tiny lettering I need a magnifying glass to see.

Is there any way I can use the nouveau xorg driver without having the console screen mode being changed to tiny?

The situation was solved using google-fu, that other people solved it already.

By putting "video=640x480" in my syslinux.cfg boot line, the console still changes mode from text to graphics, but the characters are mostly the same size. And X still gets a well-working "nouveau" driver.

This resulted in a 80x30 pseudo-text console, which looked a bit cramped. So in my rc.local file, I added "setfont drdos8x16 -h18" to make it 80x26. I can experiment with fonts.

Solved, by people years ago.