Arch Linux

SeanM

Member

Registered: 2011-02-07

Posts: 25

Framebuffers, fglrx, fbcon, and term (Pre-X environment)

Hello everyone,

I have been using the non-free driver for my pair of Radeon 5770s in on of my desktop installs of Arch.

My problem today arises from selecting a proper framebuffer that will work with fbcon, the main reason of which is to enable increased scrollback.

My current situation is thus:

I currently have a vesafb framebuffer running:

> # ls -hAl /sys/devices/platform/vesafb.0/
total 0
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root    0 Feb 22 14:55 driver -> ../../../bus/platform/drivers/vesafb
drwxr-xr-x 3 root root    0 Feb 22 09:52 graphics
-r--r--r-- 1 root root 4.0K Feb 22 15:12 modalias
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root    0 Feb 22 15:11 power
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root    0 Feb 22 09:52 subsystem -> ../../../bus/platform
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 4.0K Feb 22 09:52 uevent

and am using fbcon (I assume based on the fact that it's not an 80 column terminal):

> # ls -hAl /sys/devices/virtual/graphics/fbcon
total 0
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 4.0K Feb 22 15:12 cursor_blink
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root    0 Feb 22 15:11 power
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 4.0K Feb 22 15:12 rotate
--w------- 1 root root 4.0K Feb 22 15:12 rotate_all
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root    0 Feb 22 09:52 subsystem -> ../../../../class/graphics
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 4.0K Feb 22 09:52 uevent

Now, as I had mentioned, my primary goal is to enable large scrollback buffers. I have read the Scrollback Buffer wiki article (following their steps) to no avail.

My current boot parameters are

kernel /vmlinuz26 root=/dev/disk/by-uuid/6...d ro vga=838

I have included the vga=838 in there because attempting to use vesafb or the like results in a disabled framebuffer. (In other words, no vga=, no framebuffer).

Anyone have any idea what is going wrong? Adding fbcon=scrollback:128 (or 256, 512, etc) seems to do nothing, as does manually trying other fbcon transforms (rotate, etc.) through writing to the /sys controls.

Is there perhaps a better fb driver I should be using in conjunction with fglrx? Are there specific packages required to add extended functionality to fbcon?

Also (and I know asking more then one question in a thread sucks, but it's REALLY tightly related, though likely a different solution...):
Right now the TERM env variable is set to 'linux' when I first boot, and thus causes quite a few colour and control character problems... Is there a way to set it to have it set to something more standard on boot, such as xterm-256color other than overriding it through .bashrc?

You guys are amazing. Hope someone out there knows what's happening with fbcon!

--
Sincerely,
SeanM

Last edited by SeanM (2011-02-22 20:39:21)