X coexisting with 80x25 virtual consoles

Bill Evans at Mariposa

Bill Evans at Mariposa

On 10.2-RELEASE, I quickly discovered that if I bring up X and want to go to a virtual console by pressing, say <Alt><F2>, I need to place into /boot/loader.conf:

Code: 
kern.vty=vt
I discovered an unpleasant side effect, though. When I go from X to a virtual console, I don't get the old-fashioned 80x25 screen any more; the characters are much smaller. The closest I can get to restoring that look is:

Code: 
vidcontrol -f vgarom-8x16
That gives me a pretty nice font; not as nice as what's native in the machine, but close enough. But it's 80x33, not 80x25. Is there a way to maybe adopt this font, but force there to be only 25 lines on the screen?
 
A section of vt(4) says
Code: 
LOADER TUNABLES
  These settings can be entered at the loader(8) prompt or in
  loader.conf(5).

  hw.vga.textmode
  Set to 1 to use virtual terminals in text mode instead of graph‐
  ics mode.  Features that require graphics mode, like loadable
  fonts, will be disabled.
I have tried it some time ago and I am even not sure for what reason. I just remembered this option. May be it helps. Other sections describe how to select a different font. In a different thread not long ago, somebody recommended gallant. This could be a different solution.

EDIT: I have just tried the line below.
Code: 
kern.vt.fb.default_mode="640x480"
It changes the resolution as expected. On my system it ends up with bigger letters. May be this is more close to an old fashioned screen. Please see https://wiki.freebsd.org/action/show/Newcons?action=show&redirect=VT for additional information.
 
The trick is to get into X, move to a virtual console, and still expect to see exactly 25 lines on the screen.

I tried all seven combinations of at least one of: specifying font vgarom-8x16; setting hw.vga.textmode=1; and setting kern.vt.fb.default_mode="640x480". (And yes, I didn't forget the word " set" at the loader command prompt, but that would not have been a silly question.) Nothing works so far.
 
I've found a workaround. I still use kern.vty=vt, of course, but none of the rest of it. Remember that the font I was using was vgarom-8x16.

What I did was to create a new font, slightly taller than vgarom-8x16. One new font is all I needed, but I created several, in the spirit of exploration.

I downloaded the source code for the base release, and went to /usr/src/share/vt/fonts:
Code: 
cecil-root:/usr/src/share/vt/fonts# ls -l
total 96
-rw------- 1 root wheel   411 2015-08-25 14:05:44 Makefile
-rw------- 1 root wheel 11762 2015-08-25 14:05:56 gallant.fnt.uu
-rw------- 1 root wheel 19834 2015-08-25 14:05:45 vgarom-8x14.hex
-rw------- 1 root wheel 22306 2015-08-25 14:05:44 vgarom-8x16.hex
-rw------- 1 root wheel 12850 2015-08-25 14:05:56 vgarom-8x8.hex
-rw------- 1 root wheel 11709 2015-08-25 14:05:44 vgarom-thin-8x16.hex
-rw------- 1 root wheel  5727 2015-08-25 14:05:45 vgarom-thin-8x8.hex
cecil-root:/usr/src/share/vt/fonts#
The beginning of file vgarom-8x16.hex looked like this:

Code: 
cecil-root:/usr/src/share/vt/fonts# head vgarom-8x16.hex
# $FreeBSD: stable/10/share/vt/fonts/vgarom-8x16.hex 271333 2014-09-09 20:36:56Z emaste $
# Height: 16
# Width: 8
0000:00000000000000000000000000000000
0020:00000000000000000000000000000000
0021:0000183C3C3C18181800181800000000
0022:00666666240000000000000000000000
0023:0000006C6CFE6C6C6CFE6C6C00000000
0024:18187CC6C2C07C060686C67C18180000
0025:00000000C2C60C183060C68600000000
cecil-root:/usr/src/share/vt/fonts#
If you're familiar with the ASCII character set, you know that the space character is hex 20, the dollar sign is hex 24, and so on. Let's take the line beginning with 0024:, break it down, and look at the binary equivalent of each pair of hex digits. For legibility, I've substituted periods for zeros:

Code: 
18 ...11...
18 ...11...
7C .11111..
C6 11...11.
C2 11....1.
C0 11......
7C .11111..
06 .....11.
06 .....11.
86 1....11.
C6 11...11.
7C .11111..
18 ...11...
18 ...11...
00 ........
00 ........
So you see that each pair of hex digits in the .hex data specifies a line of a character in the font. If I wanted to add a line at the bottom of the character, I would just add another pair of hex digits. Since I wanted a blank line (one the same color as the background), I would add 00.

First, for documentation, I changed the second line in the file. Before and after:

Code: 
# Height: 16
# Height: 17
Then for each data line in the file, I added two zeros. Before and after:

Code: 
0024:18187CC6C2C07C060686C67C18180000
0024:18187CC6C2C07C060686C67C1818000000
There are many, many lines to do this to, but vi (and, I would guess, emacs) makes this easy. Then, staying in that same directory, I looked at the Makefile. I added a new line to show the name of the new file:

Code: 
# $FreeBSD: stable/10/share/vt/fonts/Makefile 271333 2014-09-09 20:36:56Z emaste $

FILES=  gallant.fnt \
        vgarom-8x8.fnt \
        vgarom-8x14.fnt \
        vgarom-8x16.fnt \
        vgarom-8x17.fnt \
        vgarom-thin-8x8.fnt \
        vgarom-thin-8x16.fnt

CLEANFILES+= ${FILES}
I made sure that the new line began with a tab, not a space. Makefiles are funny that way. I also made sure that there wasn't anything after the new "\", not even a space. Then I did the make command. I saw new files in the current directory, including vgarom-8x17.fnt. I copied that file to /usr/share/vt/fonts, and made its permissions be 444.

Then I added this line to /etc/rc.conf:

Code: 
allscreens_flags="-f vgarom-8x17"
Then I rebooted. I started X, and then went to a virtual console. There were no longer 30 lines on the screen, as there had been with vgarom-8x16, but 28. Progress.

I rinsed and repeated; vgarom-8x18 yielded 26 lines on the screen.
vgarom-8x19 yielded 25 lines. Success! vgarom-8x20 would have yielded 24 lines.

Whew!
 
Last edited by a moderator:
I have edited the title to remove the "SOLVED". I've proposed a workaround, but I'd really like to know whether there's a way to restrict the screen to 80x25 without messing with font size.
 
For what it's worth, if I have hw.vga.textmode=1 set in /boot/loader.conf, I get an 80x25 console exactly when switching from X to the console with whatever the default font is. I should also probably mention however that I'm using an Nvidia graphics card so no KMS drivers are active if that makes a difference.
 
It does work, until X starts, anyway. It lets vt(4) use the normal text mode, but starting X switches it to a graphics mode. Presumably the ROM fonts could be copied out somewhere and converted to a usable format. The card would still be in graphics mode, so the scrolling might be slower. But it would look the same.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top