How do I get vesafb for S3 Virge 968 ?

[as.gentoo]

Hi there!

I have a Diamond Stealth 64 graphics card (S3 Virge 968 chip) in my server.
Now I'd like to have more than 16 colors to work with. As well I emerged w3m & links to get informations (like access to the gentoo handbook). Sometimes it's very helpful to see pictures as well. So I emerged the image format libs, zlib and w3mimgfb and the framebuffer support for links.
Unfortunately that had no effect. Links & w3m show no images, when I use emacs to check colors ... orange, yellow gold ... all the same - I guess 16 colours again.

This far I figured out that the vesafb is missing. Since the Virge chip only supports VESA 1.2 but the kernel vesafb needs Vesa 2.0 I patched the kernel using the patch on http://www.ultimaorbita.com/~garnacho/index.html.

Again, no effect.

The interesting fact is, that I can see the grub splash screen so the card must be able to show images with least 16bit color.

Any ideas what to do here?
What did I do wrong?

---some maybe helpful information ---
/dev/fb is empty ... as well as /proc/fb ... no /dev/vesa or /proc/vesa as well
My system uses kernel 2.4.28-gentoo-r7.
"dmesg | grep vesa" only shows the kernel load command for grub.
When I configured the kernel (make menuconfig) I only checked vesafb in the framebuffer-device submenu (console drivers > fb support).
---

Thank you in advance!
~ Attila

[as.gentoo]

Just in case, links has to be started with the "graphics" switch, that is