I remember there was some discussion about problems with laptops using
Neomagic chipsets under XFree86 4.0.2 (specifically, the text mode colors
weren't correct when you switched consoles or exited the X server).

I don't recall that there was ever a solution posted, but I finally sat
down and figured out the problem - it's a bug in XFree86 4.0.2.  There
are actually two things that contribute to the problem; the driver
wasn't restoring the palette and the generic VGA code that saved the
palette has an off-by-one error that results in the palette shifting by
one every time the X server gets run.  My guess is that the console driver
for Linux restores the VGA palette itself, because I can't really see how
this would have ever worked.

This _might_ affect non-Neomagic chips as well (I'm not completely sure).
Anyway, if you have this problem, I can send you a couple of patches
to fix it (or if people prefer, I can put up a fixed X server).

--Ken