I have been increasingly getting interested in console-only environments, no little thanks to K.Mandla's inspiring articles.

However, my biggest concern was the screen resolution I could get at framebuffer. According to the prompt I was getting with the vga argument at kernel boot line, I could only get 1024x768 from my Thinkpad X200s which has a native resolution of 1440x900. Having only such a small portion of the real screen real estate obviously meant less productivity I could get.

Today, I did some research on the interwebs looking for a way to increase the framebuffer resolution. Along the several tips that looked like black magic to me, this is the simplest solution for my taste.

I installed hwinfo which you can find pre-packaged on Debian, Ubuntu and gNewSense. And the hwinfo --framebuffer command listed all possible resolutions which contained some that were not given by the aforementioned prompt. Here's the snippet that interested me the most:

Mode 0x0369: 1440x900 (+1472), 8 bits Mode 0x036a: 1440x900 (+2880), 16 bits Mode 0x036b: 1440x900 (+5760), 24 bits

Theoretically, adding one of these modes as the vga argument should enable the corresponding resolution. On my machine, however, the 24 bits mode broke the console output for a reason I don't know. But the 8 bits and 16 bits modes work charmfully.

Trying to come up with a screenshot, I also discovered the nifty fbgrab tool that takes framebuffer and X screenshots.

p.s. This machine has the on-board Intel GMA X4500MHD graphics chip.

EDIT: For those who want the clear cut solution, I basically added vga=0x036a at the end of the GRUB's kernel line.