This is almost funny. It’s definitely not deliberate.
Since the Sotec machine has been back in the house, I’ve given it a quick dust-off, and been happy to see that almost nothing has changed since the last time I touched it.
It still has a few quirks, like a tetchy CDROM and a some curmudgeonly keys. But for the most part, if properly managed, it’ll perform.
Framebuffer support in Debian though is kind of humorous. With most of the settings I tried in Grub2 (my very good friend Grub2 
), the screen had a distinct greenish wash to it.
Which made the entire experience appear in a purple-and-green tint. Ladies and gentlemen, I give you The Joker.
Under a full-scale X environment everything is fine, of course. And dropping the color depth to 8bpp makes everything right, more or less. Seems like it should be able to do better though. …
I’ll have to tinker with a few other 586-friendly distros, and see if I get the same mischievousness. No harm, no foul … but comical just the same.
Get it? Comical?! Ha! A pun! 
P.S.: That’s dvtm by the way, and quite enjoyable at 450Mhz. But when your G key is acting up, it gets a little frustrating. … 
That would be hilarious except for Heath Ledger killing himself and all.
So recompile dvtm and move to a saner modifier key
I had the same issue when i tried to setup framebuffer support for an old Toshiba Portégé 3110CT with Debian Squeeze.
The “new way” to edit GRUB_GFXMODE and GRUB_GFXPAYLOAD_LINUX in /etc/default/grub did work but also resulted in this unusual greenish view.
So i used the old way and changed GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT=”quiet splash vga=788″, with vga=788 for 800×600 resolution.
Miraculously this solved the problem.
You can revert to the normal GRUB in Debian by installing the grub-legacy package (GRUB 2 is grub-pc).
http://packages.debian.org/squeeze/grub-legacy
Also you don’t have the colour depth set right…16bit results in the green hue… set it to 24 and you should be right…I’ve noticed this on just about every laptop i’ve seen so far…
On this machine, 24-bit does the same thing. It’s a green wash until I set it to 8-bit, which is acceptable. The video card can do 16-bit color under X, but not 24-bit. Invariably X sets the depth to 24-bit by default and I get a dead black screen, so I always end up forcing it down a peg.