VESA (Video Electronics Standards Association) as it relates to video display on a computer monitor, video card adapter, and display resolutions, produces a universal standard for computer graphics founded in 1989 by NEC Home Electronics and eight other video display adapter manufacturers.
The first VESA standard was for 800×600 SVGA resolution video displays.
The VESA Software Standards Committee was closed down due to a lack of interest resulting from charging high prices for specifications.[2] At that time no VESA standards were available for free. Although VESA now hosts some free standards documents, the free collection does not include newly developed standards. Even for obsolete standards, the free collection is incomplete.
Discussion of VESA complete standards and the organization is beyond the scope of this document.
VESA video driver for Microsoft Windows
vesa is an Xorg driver for generic VESA video cards. It can drive most VESA-compatible video cards, but only makes use of the basic standard VESA core that is common to these cards. The driver supports depths 8, 15 16 and 24.
The default graphics driver is vesa (package xf86-video-vesa), which handles a large number of chipsets but does not include any 2D or 3D acceleration. If a better driver cannot be found or fails to load, Xorg will fall back to vesa.
Here is an example for a GRUB stanza, I grabbed out of my /boot/grub/menu.lst":
title Debian GNU/Linux, kernel 2.6.18-4-k7 root (hd0,0) kernel /vmlinuz-2.6.18-4-k7 root=/dev/hde2 ro vga=791 initrd /initrd.img-2.6.18-4-k7
You could also have it look like this:
title Debian GNU/Linux, kernel 2.6.18-4-k7 root (hd0,0) kernel /vmlinuz-2.6.18-4-k7 root=/dev/hde2 ro vga=0x317 initrd /initrd.img-2.6.18-4-k7