zigg/journal: Geek adventure: getting Ubuntu's console to stay in 132×60 mode

Sunday, June 21, 2009

Geek adventure: getting Ubuntu's console to stay in 132×60 mode

I'm sorry I haven't been "writing" writing here lately. I have been doing some writing over at N-Sider, though of course it's all games-related. Just been too busy, I suppose.

Anyway, I wanted to drop a quick post to note the solution to a longstanding problem I've had with Ubuntu: getting the console to stay in 132×60 text mode (or, indeed, any other text mode). 80×25 may be just fine for installations or if I had my server connected to a 9" monitor, but I don't. I'm hooked up to a 19" monitor here, and 80×25 is a waste of space.

In the distant past, I used to just add vga=0xa to the kernel parameters, which kicks in the VESA mode for 132×60. This still works in Ubuntu... but only temporarily. During the boot process, a new font is loaded which provides better character support than the old standby ASCII VGA font. The problem is that this font is 16 pixels high, and for 132×60 to keep working, the font needs to be 8 pixels high. So once this script runs, I'm left at 132×30—better than 80×25 but still not what I really wanted.

I did some digging, and it seemed the secret to getting this to stay working lies with the setupcon program, part of the console-setup package. setupcon reads /etc/default/console-setup to select its font, so I tried editing it to select an 8-pixel-high font from /usr/share/consolefonts. Which failed.

It seems that setupcon actually loads fonts from /etc/console-setup. In there, there's only Uni1-Fixed16.psf.gz by default—that's our default 16-pixel-high font. I figured there had to be some way of getting this to work in a standard fashion, so I tried a few more Google terms, waded through some more offhand mentions, and finally found my joy.

It's actually just as simple as running dpkg-reconfigure console-setup, accepting most of the current values, and then picking VGA at 8 pixels. I was somewhat amused; dpkg-reconfigure was always my go-to script for Debian, but I'd fallen out of running to it since I moved to Ubuntu a little under two years ago. But there it was. It reconfigured my current terminal for me; running setupcon in the other terminals fixed those up as well. A quick trip to /boot/grub/menu.lst to add vga=0xa (I'd been adding it manually) to the default boot paramters and a /usr/sbin/update-grub to regenerate the boot menu and I was in business for future boots as well.

The only weird thing, and I think it's a bug, is that I get underlines on top of text. Not a big deal though.

Hope this helped someone. I'm off to Father's Day dinner!

Labels: technotes, ubuntu