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chronozphere

Member

Registered: 2011-06-18

Posts: 18

[SOLVED] Setting the resolution of the root shell

Hello everybody,

I want to change the screen resolution used in the root shell. At the moment, the native size of the monitor is used, which is 1680x1050 which I think is too high. I'm visually impaired and I would like to use 800x600 or maybe even 640x480 so everything is enlarged.

I've tried a number of things. First, I played with /boot/grub/menu.lst. After trying out a few values, I used "vga=ask" to quickly test different values. At first, the selected reso seems to work during the boot process. However at some point (It's after "waiting for UDev uevents to be processed"), the resolution will revert back to my native monitor's resolution and I don't know what causes this.

I also played with fbset a bit, but I found out that when you select a lower resolution, it will just use the top-left portion of the screen instead of stretching it out over all physical pixels, which is what I want. Maybe it's possible, but how?

At this point, the system isn't very accessible for me. I still need to do a lot of installing/configuring. Can anybody point me in the right direction?

Thanks a bunch!

Last edited by chronozphere (2011-06-18 21:00:58)

karol

Archivist

Registered: 2009-05-06

Posts: 25,440

Re: [SOLVED] Setting the resolution of the root shell

What graphic drivers are you using? If the terminal is being set to its native resolution it may mean you're using KMS. You can disable it, but a better way would be to use bigger fonts - or am I missing the point?

chronozphere

Member

Registered: 2011-06-18

Posts: 18

Re: [SOLVED] Setting the resolution of the root shell

My system is a HP Proliant Microserver N36L, which has pretty standard onboard VGA, so I haven't installed any special drivers and I probably won' t do that in the future.

I'm not sure what KMS is and how to disable it (if I even have it). But I'll look into it.

Your font suggestion might be the easiest way to solve the problem. I quickly had success changing my consolefont with setfont and also figured out how to use them by default (using mkinitcpio.conf). The only problem I have is that all the fonts are too small for me. So far, I haven't seen any that are bigger than 16 pixels. My understanding is that you cannot freely scale your fonts. You have to select one of the available sizes.
After reading a little more, I found out that there are "outline fonts" which can be scaled to any size. Would it be possible to set one of these as default in rdinitcpio.conf? Also, where can I find these fonts?

Thanks

chronozphere

Member

Registered: 2011-06-18

Posts: 18

Re: [SOLVED] Setting the resolution of the root shell

Seems like your KMS suggestion lead me to the answer!

I changed my /boot/grub/menu.lst to contain the following (added nomodeset to kernel line):

kernel /vmlinuz26 root=/dev/array/root ro nomodeset

Now it keeps the default displaymode (or the one you set with vga=XXX i guess?)

thanks!

karol

Archivist

Registered: 2009-05-06

Posts: 25,440

Re: [SOLVED] Setting the resolution of the root shell

Just in case you would like to install and run xorg-server someday - it may not work with 'nomodeset' in the kernel line. Otherwise you should be fine.
I'm using terminus font and I have

CONSOLEFONT="Lat2-Terminus16"

in my rc.conf. It comes in different sizes, up to 32 which makes the capital letters 6 mm tall on my screen.