Arch Linux

Irothax

Member

From: The Netherlands

Registered: 2015-02-26

Posts: 8

Terminal font is distorted immediatly after intallation

I just installed Arch today and after I reboot after installing grub my screen appears like this:

http://i.gyazo.com/9032a199bbf1bbb89be67877a9d124af.jpg

The live USB didn't have this problem and I reinstalled Arch to be sure I configured the locale correctly.
So I was wondering if anyone knew the solution to this problem.

The laptop I am using is the HP Stream 13 and the live USB was made using the latest ISO from the website.

-- mod edit: read the Forum Etiquette and only post thumbnails http://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/For … s_and_Code [jwr] --

Knute

Member

From: Minot, ND

Registered: 2009-03-17

Posts: 604

Re: Terminal font is distorted immediatly after intallation

The first thing that comes to mind... Well 2 actually.
First, did you use the right video drivers/vga option in grub?  If you have a vga= option in your kernel in grub, you could try to remove it and see if that fixes the issue.
The second thing, is maybe you defined a font somewhere that's causing this.  (I can't remember if you do that in arch or not, I've installed several different distros so can't really remember.)

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Knute

Irothax

Member

From: The Netherlands

Registered: 2015-02-26

Posts: 8

Re: Terminal font is distorted immediatly after intallation

I will look into the video drivers option in grub. I forgot to mention that the text in grub appears normal it is after grub loads Arch that the font gets distorted. As for the font I've used the default one from the beginner's guide.

Trilby

Inspector Parrot

Registered: 2011-11-29

Posts: 29,544

Website

Re: Terminal font is distorted immediatly after intallation

You could also try adding nomodeset to the kernel line, at least for diagnostic purposes.  What is your video card / hardware?

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"UNIX is simple and coherent..." - Dennis Ritchie, "GNU's Not UNIX" -  Richard Stallman

Irothax

Member

From: The Netherlands

Registered: 2015-02-26

Posts: 8

Re: Terminal font is distorted immediatly after intallation

The CPU is an Intel Celeron N2840 and the videocard is an intel integrated graphics card but I can't seem to find which version it is.

Edit: I don't have the line VGA= in my grub settings and nomodeset doesn't seem to change anything.

Last edited by Irothax (2015-02-26 01:38:15)

frank604

Member

From: BC, Canada

Registered: 2011-04-20

Posts: 1,212

Re: Terminal font is distorted immediatly after intallation

Just curious, did you set a font in vconsole.conf during installation?

Irothax

Member

From: The Netherlands

Registered: 2015-02-26

Posts: 8

Re: Terminal font is distorted immediatly after intallation

I did another reinstall of Arch to be sure i set the font correctly and made no errors during this step. I still get the same result after grub boots Arch the font is still distorted.

frank604

Member

From: BC, Canada

Registered: 2011-04-20

Posts: 1,212

Re: Terminal font is distorted immediatly after intallation

Why not just try not setting the font? (I just use defaults, but the defaults may not apply for you, so I don't have a vconsole.conf)  Or showing us your vconsole.conf?

Irothax

Member

From: The Netherlands

Registered: 2015-02-26

Posts: 8

Re: Terminal font is distorted immediatly after intallation

my vconsole.conf contains these two lines as per the beginners guide:

KEYMAP=de-latin1
FONT=lat9w-16

Also after trying some commands with the distorted font it appears some commands like ls and mkdir are working but i cant use pacman, nano or chroot.
I will try to set the font with command but im not sure it will work. Maybe not setting a font will do the trick for me I will try another reinstall if I can't set the font.

Knute

Member

From: Minot, ND

Registered: 2009-03-17

Posts: 604

Re: Terminal font is distorted immediatly after intallation

If you do another reinstall, don't set the vconsole.conf and see what happens.

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Knute

Irothax

Member

From: The Netherlands

Registered: 2015-02-26

Posts: 8

Re: Terminal font is distorted immediatly after intallation

I have reinstalled Arch again and did not create a vconsole.conf to keep the default settings but the result is the same. I do not have the time to test this straight away but I will try to install Arch on my desktop to see if it yields the same results.

Last edited by Irothax (2015-02-26 17:56:28)

Head_on_a_Stick

Member

From: London

Registered: 2014-02-20

Posts: 7,732

Website

Re: Terminal font is distorted immediatly after intallation

You could try loading the Intel driver earlier in the boot process.
https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Ke … _KMS_start

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Are you infected with Wetiko?

Irothax

Member

From: The Netherlands

Registered: 2015-02-26

Posts: 8

Re: Terminal font is distorted immediatly after intallation

The install on my desktop went fine it doesn't have the same problem so it seems to be a hardware related problem instead of an installation one.
I tried doing the early KMS start but I did not install Xorg or Intel drivers when i was installing Arch.

teateawhy

Member

From: GER

Registered: 2012-03-05

Posts: 1,138

Website

Re: Terminal font is distorted immediatly after intallation

You don't have to reinstall each time to change a configuration file, just boot the live USB and use chroot.

Irothax

Member

From: The Netherlands

Registered: 2015-02-26

Posts: 8

Re: Terminal font is distorted immediatly after intallation

I have tried doing this but for some reason I can't chroot into the partition so I've tried mounting it but then it tells me the fstab file is missing.
I've tried googling but it turned up nothing. Could I get a short explanation on how to do this or a link would be much appreciated.

EDIT: after searching around the Arch wiki some more I found how to chroot from the live USB.
The strange thing is that some commands do seem to work when I boot normally like ls, cd, vi and clear but nano, showconsolefont, setconsolefont all return the same line.

EDIT2: I have tried using the live USB to install KDM to see if i can get the graphical environment to work but no succes.

EDIT3: After trying to install some other distro's to see if it would work I noticed 32 bit installations of linux do not seem to work on my laptop.
I checked but I am using the X86_64 version of the Arch ISO so it could still be another problem but I might be doing something wrong with installing the 64 bit version of Arch.

Last edited by Irothax (2015-02-28 15:24:54)