Upgrade to 2.6.37 kernel

Upgrading to new kernel version 2.6.37 had brought some problems:

1. Nvidia drivers on mainpc had to be upgraded and recompiled.
2. Radeon on serverpc had some firmware for Realtek missing:

Possible missing firmware /lib/firmware/rtl_nic/rtl8168d-2.fw 

     thus there was no video in raw console as well.

However, dealing with them both was pretty easy:

1: Nvidia drivers.
Log in to Console (ALT+CTRL+F1)

$ sudo service gdm3 stop

$ links ftp://download.nvidia.com/XFree86/

choose the latest ones and download. ALT+F - for links menu.

$ sudo nvidia-uninstall

follow the wizards prompts

$ sudo apt-get purge nvidia-*

$ sudo apt-get install gcc g++ linux-headers-`uname -r`

$ sudo dpkg-reconfigure -phigh xserver-xorg 

$ sudo sh NVIDIA-Linux-x86_64-270.30.run 

substitute the version, of course. Follow the prompts and you're done. Reboot if you wish to

$ sudo reboot

2: Realtek/Radeon firmware.
In GRUB menu chose any working previous version of kernel to boot.
Get the required packages:

$ sudo apt-get install realtek-firmware firmware-linux-nonfree

Update your new kernel:

$ sudo update-initramfs -k 2.6.37-<your architecture> -u

And thats it =)

Reboot to your 2.6.37 kernel. All this, I presume, is due to implementation of a mechanism to detect screen resolution and set it for console. Meaning: console has default resolution of 1248x1024 for me. Nice and clean.