[SOLVED]virtual console fonts are way too small on my laptop

jtwdyp · posted: 2012-09-22 08:12

I've had antiX on my desktop machine for awhile now and it works well for me. So when I thoroughly borked my laptops Arch Linux partition, I decided to put antiX in it's place.

The install itself was fairly easy. However I do actually use my consoles (tty[1-6]) And in fact I really dislike gui logins so I always find a way to bypass the use of any display manager and boot to console. (when/if I'm ready for a gui I use startx) There was a time when all I had to do to get a console font that I didn't need a microscope to read was to add vga=normal to the kernel options. I miss that...

I can't seem to remember nor rediscover what I did to the desktop to get reasonably large console font sizes. (Maybe it's just that I'm tired and need to sleep on it, but I blame *CRS) Anyway when I try to search for"console font" I'm finding things that suggest font size is done in slim's configuration and like that. Which would make sense to me if I was talking about the font sizes in X, but I don't see what the display manager has to do with console fonts...

Anybody want to point me at a good how-to???

Thanks

JtWdyP

* CRS :"Can't Remember Sh^Htuff" : In my case this means that unless I
* do something the same way every day for a LONG time, or have examples
* of how I did it before (where I can still find them), I usually wind up
* scratching my head the next time I need to do a non-daily task. Or for
* that matter, to remember what I was doing before the durned phone rang etc...

Alanarchy · posted: 2012-09-22 11:46

You add VGA=whatever (see link)

========= SCRAPER REMOVED AN EMBEDDED LINK HERE ===========
url was:"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VESA_BIOS_Extensions#Linux_video_mode_numbers"
linktext was:"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VESA_BIOS ... de_numbers"
====================================

to your boot options

lagopus · posted: 2012-09-22 13:21

Hi JtWdyP

I blew a fuse this morning in the bathroom, changing a switch I dismounted two weeks ago.
Testing the connection, I blew the fuse: it was the place of a plug.
Now I can put a name on that: the CRS syndrom.
Manu thanks

anticapitalista · posted: 2012-09-22 13:37

Do these help?

========= SCRAPER REMOVED AN EMBEDDED LINK HERE ===========
url was:"http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=329369"
linktext was:"http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=329369"
====================================

========= SCRAPER REMOVED AN EMBEDDED LINK HERE ===========
url was:"https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?pid=755281"
linktext was:"https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?pid=755281"
====================================

========= SCRAPER REMOVED AN EMBEDDED LINK HERE ===========
url was:"https://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/linux-hardware-18/changing-the-default-resolution-of-tty-325671/"
linktext was:"https://www.linuxquestions.org/question ... ty-325671/"
====================================

jtwdyp · posted: 2012-09-22 16:43

Alanarchy wrote:You add VGA=whatever (see link)

========= SCRAPER REMOVED AN EMBEDDED LINK HERE ===========
url was:"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VESA_BIOS_Extensions#Linux_video_mode_numbers"
linktext was:"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VESA_BIOS ... de_numbers"
====================================

to your boot options

Thanks for the link Alanarchy... It seems to me that at one point my old Arch Linux used to work that way until they wanted me to use KMS, then no mater what I set vga= to, at some point during the boot the font shrunk to near microscopic size... I can't remember how I fixed it for Arch, But I seem to remember that for Sabayon Linux I'd had to download some extra console fonts and got some help setting the console up to use them.

So since what I'm seeing is the font starts out normal (ie vga=normal) but suddenly changes during the boot time messages that usually display on tty1, I think I'll go with a solution found in one of the links in anticapitalista's reply (see below}

anticapitalista wrote:Do these help?
-snip-

Thanks, this one did, (once I remembered my old 'buntu forums password)

========= SCRAPER REMOVED AN EMBEDDED LINK HERE ===========
url was:"http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=329369"
linktext was:"http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=329369"
====================================

Since this is antiX rather than ubuntu I dispensed with sudo and typed this command in a root shell.

Code: Select all

dpkg-reconfigure console-setup

That worked...
[/size][/b]

lagopus wrote:Hi JtWdyP
I blew a fuse this morning in the bathroom, changing a switch I dismounted two weeks ago.
Testing the connection, I blew the fuse: it was the place of a plug.

Now I can put a name on that: the CRS syndrom.

Manu thanks

Your most welcome. I just wish i could give away the CRS itself rather than just the name/acronym of the syndrome...

BitJam · posted: 2012-09-27 20:42

jtwdyp wrote:
Alanarchy wrote:You add VGA=whatever [...] to your boot options
Thanks for the link Alanarchy... It seems to me that at one point my old Arch Linux used to work that way until they wanted me to use KMS, then no mater what I set vga= to, at some point during the boot the font shrunk to near microscopic size...

I've been told that using video=<x-resolution>x<y-resolution> will work in KMS mode although I have never been able to personally verify this. For example:

Code: Select all

video=1024x768

See:
========= SCRAPER REMOVED AN EMBEDDED LINK HERE ===========
url was:"http://nouveau.freedesktop.org/wiki/KernelModeSetting"
linktext was:"http://nouveau.freedesktop.org/wiki/KernelModeSetting"
====================================

I don't know why they chose to simple ignore the vga= setting. I sometimes get the impression the Nouveau and KMS people are almost trying to be a PITA on purpose. I don't care how much"better" their new way is, you do not win over hearts and minds by destroying backward compatibility and breaking working systems.

When you add something new that is hard to revoke and that make many systems unusable then it needs to be optional and not the default. Sheesh.

jtwdyp · posted: 2012-09-29 10:11

BitJam wrote: I've been told that using video=<x-resolution>x<y-resolution> will work in KMS mode although I have never been able to personally verify this. For example:
Code: Select all
video=1024x768
See:
========= SCRAPER REMOVED AN EMBEDDED LINK HERE ===========
url was:"http://nouveau.freedesktop.org/wiki/KernelModeSetting"
linktext was:"http://nouveau.freedesktop.org/wiki/KernelModeSetting"
====================================

Maybe so... But I note:
nouveau is supposedly for nVidia cards:

As it happens the only nVidia card I've got is the built in one on my desktop. My laptop (which is where I was doing this) doesn't have nVidia. And that builtin on the desktop turned out to be totally incompatible with nouveau... In each and every Linux distro I ever installed on it, I had to choose between vesa and nVidia's proprietary driver to get it working in X. And in some cases I even had to ditch nouveau just to avoid a blank screen in"text mode" on a"virtual console" such as tty1.

BitJam wrote:I don't know why they chose to simple ignore the vga= setting. I sometimes get the impression the Nouveau and KMS people are almost trying to be a PITA on purpose. I don't care how much"better" their new way is, you do not win over hearts and minds by destroying backward compatibility and breaking working systems.

When you add something new that is hard to revoke and that make many systems unusable then it needs to be optional and not the default. Sheesh.

Now on that we couldn't agree more...

BitJam · posted: 2012-09-29 17:09

While the page I linked to is Nouveau specific, the video=<x-res>x<y-res> boot parameter pertains to KMS in general and not just the Nouveau driver. If you again run into the problem of vga=xxx not working you could try using the video= boot parameter instead. It costs you very little to try and it may just fix the problem.