LCD monitor questions

[Jing Su]

>   - 90 degree display rotation, so that with "randr" (resize and rotate)
>     on linux, I'll be able to view webpages in "portrait mode"

Just be sure that the driver you use supports it.  I know that the
opensource NVidia driver supports rotation, but the closed source one does
not.

>   - in true console textmode, will the monitor be able to display more
>     than 25 rows?  I've seen LCD displays on laptops that refuse to
>     display more than 25 rows, regardless of being told to.  See my page
>     http://www.waltdnes.org/tips_and_tricks/textmodes.html for details
>     of how to do this generically on a CRT.

My Pentium120 laptop does 132x30 (as far as I can remember) without a
hitch using SVGATextMode.  The native resolution of my laptop display is
800x600.  I know that the linux framebuffer device thingy mostly only
works with Vesa2 compliant cards, and older laptops (like mine) only do
Vesa1.2.  That might explain why older laptops (or maybe even some
newer laptops) refuse to use better FB modes.

As far as I know, there is no FB implementation for Vesa1.2 video cards
because Vesa1.2 is a pain.  If I remember correctly, Vesa1.2 used
segmented and banked memory access, which was reminescent of the old
16-bit computing days.  Vesa2 uses a 32-bit flat memory space, which is
MUCH nicer to program for.  There does exist programs that will emulate
Vesa2 on top of Vesa1.2, but unfortunately they are user-mode programs,
not suitable for the kernel.

-Jing
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