Quoting Glenn E Durfee,

> I tried running a few minimal SVGALIB applications (with the svgalib
> shared libraries copied from a linux machine) but got
> "this is not a graphics-capable console" types of errors.
> ktrace shows each program opening /dev/console and attempting an
> ioctl on it, failing with an Unknown Error.

I have had a very brief look at svgalib too a few days ago, but did
not get very far. I'll be looking at it again this weekend. Perhaps
you could send me the ktrace output for the things you ran, that
would speed things up. 

- Frank