[Techtalk] Very basic tty question

[Akkana Peck]

mgmonza at iceland.freeshell.org writes:
> It's been a while since I used the tty terminals as my primay input to *nix,
> but I'm finding them an irreplaceable backup when the x server hangs up for
> any reason.

You're talking about the consoles, right? The ones you get when X is
NOT running, or using a key sequence like ctrl-alt-F2? (tty is a
general term that can also apply to terminals running under X,
and the font setting procedures are very different.)

> I seem to remember that setting the basic tty font size was a subset of the
> stty command and used columns and rows but can't find anything on this in
> all the extraneous pages returned from startpage or google.

No, definitely not part of stty. stty affects things like how keys
are processed as you type them, but it can't change how the system
graphically shows things.

> This is for Redhat 6, so not a systemd system. I found the inimitable
> Carla's page on this, but she skipped gleefully over pre-systemd in
> Redhat/CentOS/etc.

I don't have Redhat to try things out, but I'd suggest googling
terms like
redhat OR fedora OR centos console font

The first hit,
https://access.redhat.com/discussions/3943701
says you can try out fonts using
setfont fontname
where you can get font names from /usr/lib/kbd/consolfonts.
I'm suspicious of that, since it looks like "consolfonts" is
probably missing a letter; on my Ubuntu system,
locate consol | grep font
found a lot of files in /usr/share/consolefonts and you can probably
use that same locate command on your system (assuming you have
locate set up; I love locate, use it all the time).

On my Ubuntu system, I did ls /usr/share/consolefonts, but the list
was too long, so to narrow it down I tried just the Latin ones,
ls /usr/share/consolefonts | grep Lat
and after trying a few, I found
setfont Lat7-TerminusBold24x12
gave me a large clear font. Your mileage may vary depending on your
monitor resolution and just how large a font you want. Try a bunch
of them and see what works for you.

That same Redhat page says that when you find a font you like, you
can edit /etc/vconsole.conf to set it permanently.

Good luck!

        ...Akkana