Re: Tiny Console Fonts - Almost Fixed
On 8/5/10, Sven Joachim <svenjoac@gmx.de> wrote:
> On 2010-08-05 19:26 +0200, Anthony Campbell wrote:
>
>> On 05 Aug 2010, Thomas H. George wrote:
>>> >
>>> I followed these instructions chosing the Terminus font and a character
>>> height of 32 and then rebooted. The boot screen and initial scripts
>>> were easy to read, actually larger than I need BUT
>>>
>>> About half way through the boot up the scripts changed back to the tiny
>>> fonts. There was a line saying consolechars can only load fonts with a
>>> height of 16, try installing setfont. Apt-get search found setfont in
>>> kbd-compat but apt-get install reported that the latest version of
>>> kbd-compat was already installed.
>>>
>>> What now?
>>>
>>> Tom
>>>
>>
>> Isn't this the KMS issue? I solved it by editing
>> /etc/modprobe.d/radeon-kms.conf, as suggested by
>> /usr/share/doc/xserver-xorg-video-radeon.
>
> This is not a solution but rather a workaround that may stop working at
> some time in the future when xserver-xorg-video-radeon starts to
> _require_ KMS. Beside, it already won't work for Nvidia cards if you
> want to use the Nouveau X driver. So far, Thomas has not told anything
> about his graphics card.
>
>> The change to tiny font half-way through booting was exactly the symptom
>> I had before doing the above.
>
> The solution is to use a bigger font, as I had tried to explain.
>
> Sven
That's right. Actually I always look for full resolution on console.
Before KMS, for some cards I had to load the corresponding module
through /etc/modules and for some of those, I also had to provide the
resolution parameters through /etc/modprobe.d/<card_module>.conf. KMS
seems to always look for full resolution, so I've removed the stuff
from modules and modprobe.conf. Notice some times uvesafb was the
only alternative to get required resolution, :-)
When you have bigger resolution on console, you need bigger fonts.
The recommendation Sven provided is the correct one (dpkg-reconfigure
console-setup). However console-tools doesn't handle some fonts sizes
for some particular fonts, and thus, the solution is just to use
original kbd instead (which seems to support more fonts sizes). This
has been required even before KMS showed up, unless you didn't care
about getting full/bigger resolution on console...
As an additional suggestion, I recommend using console-terminus (if
you want you can also try xfonts-terminus), so you select it as well
when running dpkg-reconfigure console-setup, :-)
--
Javier.
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