The fact that you don't have a native resolution console, usually means that you don't have the console framebuffer loaded.

On most hardware made in around the last 15 or so years, once Linux KMS kicks in, your screen resolution will change to the LCD panel's native resolution.  If it isn't it may be due to some very old or obscure hardware or some changes you have made locally.

The other possibility is the proprietary AMD or Nvidia video drivers are installed?  As I recall these blacklist the Linux KMS/DRM stuff and load their own modules in their place.  But it's years since I've used any of those, so that could have changed.

I can't help much with grub as I don't use it, but it is only passing the console resolution you set to the kernel (bootloaders support passing all kinds of options to the kernel).  The best you will get out of it is probably going to be something like 1024x768 (but it has to be a supported VESA mode and not what you think your graphics adaptor or monitor can handle).

Disclaimer: I have no foreknowledge of ethtool.

However, from a quick glance at ethtool(8), there appear to be a number of options to query the driver to see what functionality is supported.  So perhaps not a matter of unsupported hardware, but an unsupported feature?

While the troll behavioural analysis might be fun, it's merely an open invitation for "more of the same please".  The more of a big deal you make of this, the more of a big deal it will become.  I'm still not entirely sure how a low traffic forum with ~ 600 member, most of which are likely not active can have such a major troll problem, major enough to warrant the installation of countermeasures?  I can only assume I missed it, that's possible as I haven't been here in a while.

So far most members who have responded to this have requested that the countermeasures be either watered down or for the "threshold" to be raised.  This may indicate that the members who are not causing trouble may not be completely in favour of this, or may have some reservations.

Panopticon made a good point earlier:

I would say that could be extended to "social experiments" where forum staff try to discipline trolls and "modify behaviour".

Sadly the WWW is what it is, some people won't fall into line and you really only have two options.

If someone enters your establishment and trashes the place, you don't allow them to remain on condition they wear a sign over their head.  You boot them out and be done with it.  That's really the only two options you have - allow them to remain or boot them out.

Perhaps if people post about "technical stuff" and just populate the forum with useful threads, this problem might solve itself.

My point is that this seems like adopting a very defensive stance and that in itself attracts trouble.  Do you have more than one example of this?

You're saying to "trolls": "you're such a problem we're having to install sorts of shit..."

Which is precisely what drives trolls.

I fail to see the value in the stats.

So if cliques "nominate" trolls what then?  As you're very active here, you must know what goes on anyway.  Leaving it to certain members to flag someone up, just seems like an open invitation for abuse.  You would surely be able to sniff out potential trouble by now.

Sadly there is no "firewall" solution for this and many of these solutions only serve to alienate decent members.

As I said, I'm against this kind of thing, against surveillance, hypocritical "tagging" or treating everyone like a potential problem, just because of the actions of a few.  There will always be personalities and those will clash and the tagging will go berserk in such cases.  For me it simply has no value.

+1

I'm sure this has been implemented with the very best of intentions.....

As I once said (over 5 years ago), Mate was a project started with Ubuntu "consumers" in mind. It was entirely founded on Ubuntu consumers making a lot of noise about "ubuntu classic" being discontinued (look it up).  It was never a "safe bet", it was always going to become what it has become today.

gnome was always a turd, it just got smellier as time went on...

gnome project will always embrace "technologies" such as polkit, dconf, mono and systemd.  For anyone not interested in technologies such as systemd, gnome always has been and always will be bad place to be.  Mate is just a gnome 2.x fork that's well past it's sell by date.

Xfce is better.  It has it's flaws, but still better - for now.  how long that will last who can say?

While "desktops" become more Linux centric and more reliant on "Linux proprietary" technology, that can only be a bad thing for free *nix and Linux distributions which do not use systemd.  This actually makes desktops, by their very nature, just a bad thing for anyone wanting to avoid all of the usual crap listed above (plus other cruft such as avahi and pulseaudio).

(I use OpenBSD exclusively.  I avoid desktops, except Xfce (for now), I don't used it (I use fluxbox), but tend to keep it installed for other users.)

For future reference - there was a kernel upgrade (3.16.0-4-amd64 to 3.16.0-5-amd64) at the same time as your installation of the broadcom-sta / wl driver package.

You can see that dkms complains about their being no headers, for the running kernel etc.

Running a full upgrade first would have resolved this.

Now that's what I call getting one's knickers in a twist...

Hehe... you're right, but there was never any resentment and anger in the first place (as you well know).

What is compiled is essentially "wrappers" and some "glue".  It's a binary driver.  Nvidia do not release specs to free software developers, let alone source code.  A kernel module is built for the target kernel, but that's a bit of a red herring - it's pretty much all binary.

No offence was intended, I'm just pointing out that if transparency and accountability is desired, then it's best not to cloud things.  Otherwise you may as well hit the ban button and not bother yourself with explaining why or keeping an "evidence bag".

As number 9 of the top 10 posters, you should know.

That last statement of yours is untrue.

I've made my views on this clear by now, so at this stage I'll call it a day.

Sounds like stuff you could just configure yourself, according to your personal preferences/hardware...?

Bear in mind that there are other bootloaders, such as lilo - i.e. a simple bootloader of about 600kB (most of which is in fact bitmaps and man pages) which installs and loads entirely from the DOS mbr, not over 20MB of fancy, self indulgent, complex crap.  So it doesn't seem to make much sense to invest so much in customising one particular bootloader to a particular subset of hardware which might break things for certain users.

Amazingly the BSDs managed to come up with simple EFI bootloaders once there was a need for that, but still Linux distributions are still pushing this same "kitchen sink" solution (sound familiar?).