talking about vesa, I learnt a nice little trick from spblinux's author. One can use mplayer to query what vesa mode is supported by the display chip by :

mplayer -v some_video_file > log

the log would contain all the available one for the vga= parameter. Though it is listed in hex and somehow 512(decimal) is needed to be added to the value to come out the proper vga= value.

So one can always boot with vga=normal and fine out what vesa modes is there then later fix that in the boot configure in LILO/GRUB for future use, should vesa is needed.