Re: Debian Jessie : regular console instead of a hi-res one!
David Wright composed on 2016-09-13 13:36 (UTC-0500):
Rather curious to see a regular participant here with a .co.uk mailing
address apparently in a university environment in a UTC-0500 time zone.
Curiosity makes it for me a recurring distraction, wondering just what part
of the world this might be, somewhere north of Wisconsin, Minnesota or North
Dakota? :-p
On Thu 08 Sep 2016 at 12:53:49 (-0400), Felix Miata wrote:
David Wright composed on 2016-09-08 09:08 (UTC-0500):
>You can play with framebuffers and kernel drivers all you like.
>What you cannot do is alter the layout of pixels on the screen.
Absolutely true.
>If you don't use a resolution that matches those pixels exactly,
>nothing you do can compensate.
False. The difference from one resolution to the next is easily lost
if the screen resolution is beyond the resolving power of the eyes.
>You are deluding yourself if you think you can.
Been doing it for years. One factor is called natural optical
deterioration. There's a limit to resolving power that typically
gets worse with age. It's a primary reason why complaints are ever
made about tiny fonts accompanying increased pixel density.
The main reason people complain about tiny fonts
I'd like to see a cite for the assertion of this "main" reason.
? is because they're
often difficult to change, or changing them leads to undesirable
effects, like web pages that don't re-wrap lines to take account
of the change.
I rather think the *main* reason is difficulty reading them, closely followed
by, or in conjunction with, their pervasiveness, which is almost as commonly
coupled with gray color instead of best contrast black.
Probably for most people, most of computing any more is within the confines
of a browser window. Now that ≤IE6 support is history, more and more websites
have taken to defining all sizes in px, with text sizes most commonly those
suited for the lowest pixel density screens, rather rarely as large as 16px,
which on a larger than average size but also higher than average density
2560x1440 screen is only 9.8pt, while a much more common 13px is <8pt and a
not uncommon 10px is 6.1pt.
Others with poorer than it used to be eyesight, like myself, or at least
poorer than average, and/or higher density screens, surely get rather tired
as do I of the need to either zoom on entry to every previously unvisited
domain, or suffer the ill effects of either configuring use of a minimum text
size or disabling site styles altogether.
But with an armoury of font sizes, six in my case from tiny to vast,
there's no difficulty changing at all, as long as one is prepared
to visit the bash prompt (or use a shell-escape).
Easy for you to say. Do you have a realistic idea how hard it is to do
anything when the defaults start difficult to manage in the first place, the
proverbial chicken and egg problem? It's a whole lot easier to make too big
text smaller than it is to make too small text bigger. Maybe size 6 isn't so
vast when density is double the reference standard and the acuity is below
average.
It's easy to be misled by just considering the means to resolve two
dots of lines from each other as the only function of display
resolution. The crispness of a font depends on the angles of edges
to which the eye is very sensitive, even when it can't resolve the
actual dots themselves that make up that edge.
Maybe it's time to emulate some senior eyeballs. Hang some cheesecloth in
front of your face, turn screen brightness down below 33%, let plenty of
bright sunlight into the area where the display faces, and double or triple
the normal distance between screen and face, then try to discern any
difference in crispness between the vtty's default 9x16 font at 1280x720, and
larger pixel size fonts on the same display at a native 1920x1080. Once the
threshhold is reached, more px density is wasted.
Another factor has to do with screen size and distance, not
necessarily caused by deterioration, but because of eyes never that
good to begin with, and corrective lenses that do a better job at
particular focal lengths. Too close and pixels can become apparent
and bothersome. More distance can work better.
If the pixels are as large as to be bothersome, then make them
smaller, ie use a higher resolution on the screen! Why would you
ever use a lower resolution in that case?
Visual threshhold vs. ease of (re)configuring. For a lot of people, the only
way they know to deal with everything being too small is to reduce
resolution. Is it ideal? Of course not! Do people do it? It's common among
the simple minded and the elderly.
IOW:
1-Don't knock it if you haven't tried it. By this I don't mean tried
only on Debian installations either. The default framebuffer font of
Debian and its derivatives is very commonly different from
non-Debian distros, represented by the spindly ugly thing used by
Ubuntu. Without Plymouth, one can typically see the initial font
during post is much bolder, changing somewhere along the way to the
desktop or login prompt to a much lighter stroked variety. If all
you've ever seen is the lightweight, try a (Debian) Knoppix CD or
DVD and you'll see what Fedora and openSUSE users see by default
(TerminusBold?) on their framebuffers, a font that's nicely bold and
forgiving of non-optimal screen resolution.
Well, I'm up for that. Tell me what I have to do: it's quite involved.
Which "that" are you up for that's "quite involved"?
I can blacklist my i915 module; should I replace it in /etc/modules
with, say, the i810fb module.
I don't diddle with any modules in tweaking vtty behavior to my satisfaction.
Or should I just add
video=intelfb:mode=640x480@60,accel,hwcursor,vram=8
to grub's boot line?
Dunno. What's your goal?
When I want to change resolution, which keys should I press to do that?
In which context? Grub menu? Plymouth-free vttys? Vttys with Plymouth?
Different fonts for different vttys?
And last, but not least, I need a surefire method of determining what
resolution I have succeeded in running. With native resolution, that's
very simple. I put some text on the screen such that the bottom line
and rightmost character are both used, determine the pixels used in
the character grid, multiply each with $LINES and $COLUMNS, and then
add the unused pixels at the bottom and right edges. All done with
a handlens.
Or more simply, just see what fbset reports.
2-Don't expect just because you decide it's not for you that it
can't be for anyone else.
I've made no such decision. I'm just trying to understand your
statements in terms of the physics. If you take a font with an
x-height of 8 pixels and decrease the resolution to make it 50%
taller and wider, why would making the font with 8 bigger pixels be
clearer than making it with 12 pixels of the original size? You've now
got over twice as many pixels to manipulate.
Again, it's about reaching the resolving power threshold, or not. More pixels
in a given space is higher resolution, is higher quality, but wasted if the
resolving power limit is already reached at 8. I'm not asserting that higher
pixel density is bad, only that past a certain point, a given set of eyeballs
may not be able to make use of more.
3-Lowered resolution for the framebuffers does not necessarily
dictate resolution for Xorg. For the past couple of years or so, if
using the Intel Xorg driver, Xorg will default to the cmdline video=
directive, in contrast to nouveau and radeon sticking to native by
default, but this can be overcome via xrandr or xorg.con* or the DE.
I normally configure them differently, native for Xorg, reduced for
framebuffer.
Irrelevant. We're talking about linux consoles here.
We're talking about how we get where we want to go, and the ramifications of
the various methods of getting there that depend on which driver and/or gfx
hardware is used.
4-I'm not suggesting font reconfiguration can't be appropriate, only
that there may be an easier way that is quite suitable, particularly
for a machine that is shared among people with diverse visual
acuity.
I need to try your method to have an opinion about that. I've
explained how easy it is with my method to have each VC at a different
font size simultaneously and independently.
You haven't to degree that I can grok how it is that you find your method
easy/fast/convenient/other.
So I need to know
your keystrokes for comparison.
Again, which context? I boot using Grub with Gfxboot versions that display a
substantial tail of the selected stanza. The way I configure, there's
typically little stroking, typically limited to one or more instances of
Left, then holding down the BS key until what I want removed is gone.
--
"The wise are known for their understanding, and pleasant
words are persuasive." Proverbs 16:21 (New Living Translation)
Team OS/2 ** Reg. Linux User #211409 ** a11y rocks!
Felix Miata *** http://fm.no-ip.com/
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