[Fwd: Archive frozen for preparation of Ubuntu 9.10]

[Walter Dnes]

On Thu, Oct 15, 2009 at 09:59:39AM -0400, Madison Kelly wrote

> - The default font size in terminals, and I mean outside of X, is much 
> smaller. This means that when you do ctrl+alt+f[1-6], you have MUCH more 
> screen space to work with. This is probably one of my favourite changes.

  I've been doing this for ages on various distros, *WITHOUT* using
VGATextMode .  Here's the scoop...
* it requires a combination of VGA boot modes and font selections
* in lilo/grub
  - VGA=2 gives you 640 pixels across x 350 scanlines (ye olde EGA)
  - the default is 640 pixels across x 400 scanlines
  - VGA=6 gives you 640 pixels across x 480 scanlines

  In Gentoo, the fonts are stored in /usr/share/consolefonts/

waltdnes at d530 ~ $ ll -og /usr/share/consolefonts/lat1*
-rw-r--r-- 1 1681 Jul 10 05:02 /usr/share/consolefonts/lat1-08.psfu.gz
-rw-r--r-- 1 1771 Jul 10 05:02 /usr/share/consolefonts/lat1-10.psfu.gz
-rw-r--r-- 1 1861 Jul 10 05:02 /usr/share/consolefonts/lat1-12.psfu.gz
-rw-r--r-- 1 1906 Jul 10 05:02 /usr/share/consolefonts/lat1-14.psfu.gz
-rw-r--r-- 1 1973 Jul 10 05:02 /usr/share/consolefonts/lat1-16.psfu.gz

  The "-08", "-10", etc gives the pixel height of the font.  The number
of rows in a true textmode console is calculated by dividing the number
of scanlines by the height of the font.  In the old days of CGA in DOS
on the IBM PC, the only mode was 8x8 font on a 640x200 textmode console,
giving 80 columns x 25 rows.  Along came the EGA at 640x350 display with
a 14-pixel high font.  It was much more readable.  By using various
combinations of scanlines and fonts you can get 80 columns by various
numbers of rows...


Font
height  350   400  480

16       21    25   30

14       25    28   34

12       29    33   40

10       35    40   48

 8       43    50   60

  Did you know that you can change the number of rows from a text
console?  In Gentoo, the command is setfont.  Select the font you want.
Stick with the lat1-* fonts, or you might complain that "it's all Greek
to me".

-- 
Walter Dnes <waltdnes-SLHPyeZ9y/tg9hUCZPvPmw at public.gmane.org>
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