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#1 2017-03-20 12:51:35

fixios
Member
Registered: 2017-03-20
Posts: 2

[SOLVED] Macbook 11,3 - Small console font, clueless Newbie

Hi there,

I've taken on the quest to correct an error made in late 2013 by installing Arch Linux on my Macbook 11,3 (15" Retina, Late 2013, dedicated Nvidia GPU). I'm happy to report that I got everything working fine, and I'm pretty happy with the first user experience.

One issue remains though, which is driving me nuts. I failed to it solve for a couple of days. The console font is being re-set to default, i.e. very very tiny, during the boot process.

What happens:
During boot, I do see the console font being set to the one I desire and which suits the Retina display, yet the console font in xterm in the Cinnamon desktop environment then is the tiny default one. Trying to set the font via "setfont sun12x22" results in the error: "Couldn't get a file descriptor referring to console", whereas "sudo setfont sun12x22" produces no output and has no effect.

My configuration:

  • bootloader: systemd-boot

  • nvidia display driver

  • lightdm display manager

  • Cinnamon Desktop

  • Desired console font is set in /etc/vconsole.conf, see below

  • LightDM is configured via a script as recommended in the wiki, see below

I tried to tackle the problem by adding consolefont to the hooks in the /etc/mkinitcpio.conf, and I did add "nvidia" to the modules being loaded before the boot hooks. According to my research, this should have done the trick, but it doesn't, sadly. I still believe the NVIDIA driver is at fault.

Contents of my /etc/vconsole.conf:

FONT=ter-u32n
KEYMAP=de

Contents of light-dm script, loaded after line "[Seat:*]" in /etc/lightdm/lightdm.conf via "display-setup-script=/etc/lightdm/display_setup.sh":

#!/bin/sh
xrandr --setprovideroutputsource modesetting NVIDIA-0
xrandr --auto

Would appreciate any help and/or hints, obviously. Ideally, someone could direct me to solving this on the configuration I have. My best guess right now would be to re-install Arch Linux completely using GRUB and then trying Bumblebee, but I'd like to have confirmation that this would solve the problem before I invest another day or two. Sincere thanks to anyone investing time to help.

Cheers!

Last edited by fixios (2017-03-20 14:52:00)

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#2 2017-03-20 14:54:25

fixios
Member
Registered: 2017-03-20
Posts: 2

Re: [SOLVED] Macbook 11,3 - Small console font, clueless Newbie

Ok, a friend revealed the enormous severity of my ignorance: console font != xterm font.

For similarly stupid guys in the future:
You can set the font size in xterm by adding something like this in a file called "~/.Xresources"

xterm*font:     *-fixed-*-*-*-18-*

Cheers.

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