/dev/vga dissappeared?

So, I upgraded everything today
and I no longer have X because it requires /dev/vga
which has dissappeared out of /dev

As I have no X I have no browser (comments about lynx will
be ignored ;-)
so I'm having trouble looking up resources to see what may have happenned.

The vga driver reports as having found a device in dmesg
but there is no such device in /dev.

I recall a couple of emails on the topic a while ago but I can't
look them up now...
can someone let me know what the resolution was?
should I be adding a symlink to something somewhere?

is this a known problem?

Julian