Arch Linux

Jackleberryfin

Member

Registered: 2022-01-21

Posts: 9

Login shell low resolution large font

Hey arch'ers first post, first arch install.
Really enjoying learning the nitty gritty of Linux.

I'm very slowly making my way through the installation guide. Haven't had too many problems yet apart from the usual wifi drivers and USB tether working in live but not in the real installation (still figuring out that one). Probably haven't started systemd-networkd.service.

Hopefully my dumb ass doesn't get too flamed on my first post. Once booting into the real install I noticed immediately that the login shell is totally different to the live CD shell. The resolution of characters is far lower. Soo much text wrap. Lack of colours etc.

Is there a way to replicate the look and feel of the live CD shell in my installed arch... I didn't mind the experience with the live CD.

FYI I'm not using Grub or any extra bootloader which I think means I'm using efiStub. Configured with efibootmgr which I think is relevant as lots of shell resolution posts mention editing the grub conf.

I'm not yet at the stage of installing Xorg/Wayland or anything remotely GUI related. Which I'm thinking shouldn't be necessary as I didn't think either of these are present/running on the live CD.

I did some searching and didn't find anything super duper vanilla like what I'm chasing. Perhaps theres a character width or font size parameter somewhere which does the magic trick.

I found /etc/drbl/drbl-ocs.conf had a console_prefer_cols="100" which I changed to 200. No change.

I'm aware it's entirely possible that the live CD is using something like grub to achieve the vastly superior look and feel. Hopefully some knowledgeable person can confirm what causes the difference between live CD and installed. It's driving my OCD up the wall.

Jackleberryfin

Member

Registered: 2022-01-21

Posts: 9

Re: Login shell low resolution large font

I found ocs-console-font-size which when run complains about a missing config file /etc/default/console-setup. Which lead me to ocsmgrd which is part of clonezilla.. which sounds like it's all starting to make a little sense with some of the comments in the drbl conf.

It kinda sounds like I need to figure out how to setup and configure clonezilla? Or write a config file for ocs-console-font-size to read? If anyone has done something like this.. would really appreciate any resources to reference. I'll continue to pull this thread and learn what I can.

Last edited by Jackleberryfin (2022-01-21 11:27:07)

Jackleberryfin

Member

Registered: 2022-01-21

Posts: 9

Re: Login shell low resolution large font

Setfont <8x8font> seems to be a pretty big improvement. But when I do this on the live CD it goes much smaller than my installed copy. And is much clearer at those sizes. So there is clearly something else missing.

It's quite probable I've neglected some portion of the initial font setup... Though I'm not sure what I might have missed.

Scimmia

Fellow

Registered: 2012-09-01

Posts: 12,445

Re: Login shell low resolution large font

What video card?

V1del

Forum Moderator

Registered: 2012-10-16

Posts: 24,088

Re: Login shell low resolution large font

Welcome to the boards, please edit rather than multi post to append new information.

Which graphics driver? If you installed nvidia then the fact that your terminal will be lower res is pretty much a given and not easily fixable, other than if it's just a modesetting race, see the following link. For all of the other things there exists relevant wiki pages, not sure how you even came across Clonezilla, which is completely irrelevant to the console of your own system.

https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Kernel … _KMS_start
https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Linux_console#Fonts

For the pretty colors, that's because the live disk uses zsh with the grml config as present in the grml-zsh-config package. By default you will have bash on your installed system.

Jackleberryfin

Member

Registered: 2022-01-21

Posts: 9

Re: Login shell low resolution large font

Showconsolefont -i on both systems are 8x16x256

Ter-u16 looks fantastic on live.
Ter-u12 is probably almost too small on live.

The problem is not strictly font related. Is it screen or screen map related maybe? Totally guessing here.

Jackleberryfin

Member

Registered: 2022-01-21

Posts: 9

Re: Login shell low resolution large font

What video card?

Sorry about the multi-posts will edit the post in a second if I still have the option. Posting from my phone like a spaz.

Graphics cards are both NVIDIA :S haha.
1050
1070

I don't recall if I've installed any drivers so far? I think I might have nvidia-dkmg rings a bell....

Thanks V1del I'll have a look at those pages.

V1del

Forum Moderator

Registered: 2012-10-16

Posts: 24,088

Re: Login shell low resolution large font

As mention if you indeed are using  the nvidia driver then trying to get a high res TTY terminal is either more trouble than it's worth or not worth the effort. You'll get much better control with a fullres/fullscreen terminal emulator from within an actual graphical session.

Jackleberryfin

Member

Registered: 2022-01-21

Posts: 9

Re: Login shell low resolution large font

As mention if you indeed are using  the nvidia driver then trying to get a high res TTY terminal is either more trouble than it's worth or not worth the effort. You'll get much better control with a fullres/fullscreen terminal emulator from within an actual graphical session.

Just so strange that live CD performs so well on the same hardware. Very frustrating.

Edit: Ah driver is what you mention and different. My bad. Yeh might do another clean install without the NVIDIA driver to check if it makes a difference.

Last edited by Jackleberryfin (2022-01-21 13:55:11)

Scimmia

Fellow

Registered: 2012-09-01

Posts: 12,445

Re: Login shell low resolution large font

Because the ISO would be using Nouveau, not Nvidia.

V1del

Forum Moderator

Registered: 2012-10-16

Posts: 24,088

Re: Login shell low resolution large font

Well you can replicate that by removing the nvidia driver and thus falling back to nouveau, but you'll likely very quickly will notice the downsides of that once you actually try to do something graphically intensive. You can technically set a certain framebuffer res with GRUB: https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/GRUB/T … resolution or if you have a good UEFI implementation by disabling BIOS/CSM emulation. But the latter isn't really guaranteed to be the case with desktop mainboards.

Edit: Need to refresh harder before the submit, you definitely do not need to reinstall, get rid of that mentality, it's basically never necessary and you don't actually learn how the components of your system interact with each other. As mentioned to replicate this for now you could just remove the nvidia-dkms package and reboot which would automatically fall back to nouveau.

Last edited by V1del (2022-01-21 14:00:26)

Jackleberryfin

Member

Registered: 2022-01-21

Posts: 9

Re: Login shell low resolution large font

Well you can replicate that by removing the nvidia driver and thus falling back to nouveau, but you'll likely very quickly will notice the downsides of that once you actually try to do something graphically intensive. You can technically set a certain framebuffer res with GRUB: https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/GRUB/T … resolution or if you have a good UEFI implementation by disabling BIOS/CSM emulation. But the latter isn't really guaranteed to be the case with desktop mainboards.

Edit: Need to refresh harder before the submit, you definitely do not need to reinstall, get rid of that mentality, it's basically never necessary and you don't actually learn how the components of your system interact with each other. As mentioned to replicate this for now you could just remove the nvidia-dkms package and reboot which would automatically fall back to nouveau.

Haha thanks, yeh my refresh game is about as good as my package, driver, service game.

Edit: NVIDIA-dkms removed. Lspci is showing nouveau as the kernel modules for the VGA controllers.

Is that sufficient to say that I've successfully reproduced display drivers?

The font/display res is still the same after reboot.

Last edited by Jackleberryfin (2022-01-21 14:23:21)

Jackleberryfin

Member

Registered: 2022-01-21

Posts: 9

Re: Login shell low resolution large font

or if you have a good UEFI implementation by disabling BIOS/CSM emulation. But the latter isn't really guaranteed to be the case with desktop mainboards.

Sorry, are you able to elaborate on what you mean by this non-grub solution. I've got a supermicro X9dri-ln4f+ server mainboard.

Edit: might be unnecessary. I've just found that /sys/devices/virtual/graphics/fbcon/subsystem/fb0/virtual_size = 800,600 on installed system and 1680,1050 on live CD.

I'll do some searching around/down this rabbit hole for now.

Last edited by Jackleberryfin (2022-01-21 15:14:07)

V1del

Forum Moderator

Registered: 2012-10-16

Posts: 24,088

Re: Login shell low resolution large font

It needs to show nouveau as the kernel module in use. If you uninstall just nvidia-dkms you might still have nvidia-utils lying around which you need to get rid of as well.

Last edited by V1del (2022-01-21 16:12:00)

Jackleberryfin

Member

Registered: 2022-01-21

Posts: 9

Re: Login shell low resolution large font

It needs to show nouveau as the kernel module in use. If you uninstall just nvidia-dkms you might still have nvidia-utils lying around which you need to get rid of as well.

lsmod shows nothing for nvidia.
6 modules showing nouveau including video module.

Edit: found the lingering nvidia-utils and removed it. Doing reboot.

Edit: now all NVIDIA drivers and utils are gone. Resolution automatically maxed out and looks great. What a pain in the butt! Thanks for your assistance! You were right from the very start!

Last edited by Jackleberryfin (2022-01-21 17:02:58)