On Tue, Mar 03, 2015 at 08:01:45PM -0800, Paul Rogers wrote: > This isn't a request for a problem solution on LFS, but for advice. In > the decade I've been using LFS I've avoided using framebuffers. That's > been OK for the stuff I do, which is as often on CLI as in X, but things > have moved on a lot, and I guess it's time--got an i7 and Nvidia card > now for one thing ;-) . On this LFS-7.2 system I'm building out I tried > it, picking up the Nouveau driver in the process. As soon as udev > creates /dev/fb0 the console explodes into huge screen with an itsy, > bitsy miniscule font that is often too hard to read. Some stuff I see > says to use vga=769 on the boot line. That does nothing. The LDP > HowTo's are 5 years old and speak of kernel-2.1! > > So my question is, where is a good source for me to get up to speed so I > can make the console framebuffer behave the way I want outside of X?
Look for information on video=, for example video=1024x768. The useful value(s) will depend on your monitor. For example, my main monitor is 1600x1200. On that I sometimes use video=800x600 (radeon, kms, 8x16 console font). On other boxes, or other systems on that box, I omit the video= specification and sometimes use a 12x22 console font. Unfortunately, there are no console fonts between 8x16 and 12x22 - well, maybe there are a few 9-wide non UTF-8, but nothing useful and certainly no intermediate heights (I did spend some time trying to create an intermediate height font, but gave it up as a waste of my time : 12x22 gave me enough columns and rows to be useful). If you want to use 12x22, you need to select it in the kernel, I think (Sun 12x22 font), otherwise trying to load a 12x22 font in kbd may fail. Basically, it comes down to the details of what you want. I remember somebody complaining fairly recently, perhaps on lkml, because a framebuffer on his screen gave him a _lot_ more than the 80x25 that he really wanted. Me, I'm happy to see the penguins and a few more character cells ;-) [ I ran linux on ppc apples for some years, and there a framebuffer was mandatory, even if the config help suggested it was a dangerous experiment. ] For 7.2, vga= is probably fine (although I think that the version of grub even that long ago claimed that vga= was deprecated). I still use a vga= option (with 7.6) on the "desktop" machine which is my server. But I've also been using it recently in qemu to try the vmware driver - with unusable (console) results. ĸen -- Nanny Ogg usually went to bed early. After all, she was an old lady. Sometimes she went to bed as early as 6 a.m. -- http://lists.linuxfromscratch.org/listinfo/lfs-support FAQ: http://www.linuxfromscratch.org/blfs/faq.html Unsubscribe: See the above information page Do not top post on this list. A: Because it messes up the order in which people normally read text. Q: Why is top-posting such a bad thing? A: Top-posting. Q: What is the most annoying thing in e-mail? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Posting_style
