Are you dealing with a LCD monitor? If so, it may be helpful to kick your console into framebuffer mode running at the native resolution for your monitor. See http://tldp.org/HOWTO/Framebuffer-HOWTO-5.html I had a KVM monitor that would display nothing and go to sleep when I switched over to my Linux servers until I set the framebuffer to the monitor's native resolution. Was rather annoying as the KVM would also get stuck on that channel and refused to switch to another one... :) -- Andrew S. Zbikowski | http://andy.zibnet.us IT Outhouse Blog Thing | http://www.itouthouse.com