Arch Linux

michaelmcandrew

Member

Registered: 2017-11-07

Posts: 4

Font too small when asking for encryption password [SOLVED]

Hi all,

Have been using Arch for a month or two now. Very much enjoying the experience Learning lots, and have figured out a few things for myself, but one thing I have not been able to solve is the following...

I have an xps13 with a 3200x1800 screen. It has an Intel Corporation HD Graphics 5500 card. I have encrypted my disk with

cryptsetup -y -v luksFormat /dev/sda1

and am using systemd-boot.

When it prompts me for the encryption passphrase, the font is very small and I would like to make it bigger. OK, admittedly, I know what it is asking me, so I could just the passphrase and not worry, but I would like to see if I can solve this issue.

A couple of other people have asked similar questions but the trail has gone cold:

* https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=225841
* https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=182311

I have "video=2560x1440" appended to the options line in /boot/loader/entries/arch.conf and this video mode kicks in once I have decrypted the harddrive. Am I wrong in presuming that there must be a similar way to set the resolution in my initramfs-linux.img?

And since I like to be flexible I thought I'd try another approach. I edited /etc/mkinitcpio.conf and set the following:

MODULES="i915"

HOOKS="base udev autodetect modconf block filesystems keyboard fsck keymap encrypt consolefont"

Then edited my vconsole.conf and added a large terminus font, then ran sudo mkinitcpio -p linux which completed without complaining but again the console font only displayed after entering the passphrase.

So neither approaches seem to work. Any ideas? I'd like to get to the bottom of both of them if at all possible.

Thanks,
Michael

Last edited by michaelmcandrew (2017-11-08 07:45:00)

aiBo

Member

Registered: 2010-11-10

Posts: 50

Re: Font too small when asking for encryption password [SOLVED]

Move consolefont before encrypt in your hook list. They are executed in that order.

michaelmcandrew

Member

Registered: 2017-11-07

Posts: 4

Re: Font too small when asking for encryption password [SOLVED]

Awesome - that worked! Thanks very much

I played around some more and also got the initial approach (changing the resolution) working as well.

I have "video=2560x1440" appended to the options line in /boot/loader/entries/arch.conf and this video mode kicks in once I have decrypted the harddrive. Am I wrong in presuming that there must be a similar way to set the resolution in my initramfs-linux.img?

Yes - I was wrong. There isn't a similar approach - it is the same approach What I now understand (correct me if I am wrong) is that the options line in the boot loader entry is applied to /initramfs-linux.img (as well as whatever other kernel is loaded) but that the video option was not having an effect because the video driver module (i915 in my case) was not loaded into the kernel (see https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Ke … _KMS_start for more details).

To put it another way, appending ' video=2560x1440' or similar to the options does work as long as the module is loaded in your /initramfs-linux.img.

Upon reflection, I prefer the consolefont approach since I like to run at the native resolution.