[Techtalk] Very basic tty question

[mgmonza at iceland.freeshell.org]

On Tue, 22 Oct 2019, Akkana Peck wrote:

> Date: Tue, 22 Oct 2019 10:01:40 -0600
>
> 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 meant the ones you get when X isn't running.  I use basic Gnome terminal 
in X and it has everything on my not very list of things I need from a 
terminal.  I would say tty1-6, only on this Scientific Linux system, tt1 
seems to be a backup graphics terminal, tty7 just goes blank, and 2-5 are 
the console terminals.

>
>> 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.

Okay. I'm afraid I'm drawing most off my 20 year old memories of Unix & c? 
shell, when resizing the terminal and adjusting the font was one of the 
first things I would do in a new profile & stty seemed to be part of that. 
I guess 20 years is a bit too long for accurate memory.


> 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).

Thank you. I did all of this before I posted, but setfont only sets the 
font for the current session. My SciLinux 6 system doesn't have that 
vconsole.conf thing to set the default.  It maybe that it has to be 
created.  I did do quite a bit of searching, but it seems no one likes my poor old 
32 bit Redhat 6 system. <sniff>
(I love locate too, only again with the old memory, forgot to run updatedb 
first for something I *knew* I'd added and spent a frustrating 1/2 hour or 
so before that "duh!" occured to me.)

> 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
>

Thank you. I did manage to get all this done for my (also pretty old) 
Ubuntu and Mint systems.  If I remember correctly, I used the same options 
you did. They did look familiar, but I'd have to go look at the boot 
menu.lst and other options again.

If it looks like they'll do what David wants and don't duplicate what you 
said, I post those later.

MG