Baslinux mailing list

[Sindi Keesan <keesan AT iamjlamb.com>]

> In DOS, I was using smaller VGA screen (console) fonts to
> browse, or even Cyrillic (small or large) fonts.  (We even designed three
> Cyrillic fonts when we could not find what I wanted to view Macedonian, 
> and these fonts also work in linux.)

As it turns out, these fonts are smaller only vertically - they are 
available in 8x8, 8x14, 8x16 (standard default) and sometimes 8x10 or 8x12 
pixel size, so you can get more on a page but not in width, which is not 
helpful when browsing with links (you still need to scroll sideways).

To change fonts, install a package (kbd.tgz?) and then type setfont followed 
by 
the name of one of the font files in /usr/lib/kbd/consolefonts.  If you 
want to use the upper ASCII characters and have them mapped correctly, you 
will probably need to load a unicode mapping file first.  The font 
viscii*.psfu.gz has that built in and you can load that followed 
immediately by the font you want to use.  Or you can make a unicode 
mapping file (see man setfont):

setfont viscii* (you might need to type it all out, but it seems to work 
with * if there is only one viscii* and you are in consolefonts)

setfont -ou u (u being the name I assigned to the file which contains the 
current unicode mapping, which was loaded with viscii - Vietnamese)

Then when you load other fonts type
setfont -u u fontname  (omit any psf or gz parts).

In theory all files with .psfu. have builtin unicode mappings but I could 
not get the Armenian Goha to display properly without first loading the 
file I had made from viscii mapping.

 
> Instead of actually loading different fonts, in DOS I can also use vmode
> (or perhaps even the DOS mode command) to load different sizes of VGA
> fonts by their number.  Is there something similar for linux, that you can
> do after booting, to change between numbers of columns and rows, other
> than load different sizes of font with the loadfont program?  I am not
> after different styles of font but just different sizes of the same style.
> 
> _______________________________________________

Linux doctor explains how to do this using resizecons COLSxROWS
but resizecons needs a file that you have to make first for each
combination, using restoretextmode (man resizecons)

restoretextmode -w 8x25
restoretextmode -r 8x25  - this makes the file

But when I tried this out on my computer I got some comments about svgalib 
not working quite perfectly with my S3 video chip (it is the only S3 I 
could get to work with the S3 driver), and then when I typed

resizecons 8x25  I got a scrambled screen and had to reboot.
It resizes all the consoles so none of them worked any more.

Does this work for anyone else?


In theory svgalib works nicely with Cirrus (to 32 bit color) and 24 bit
color with Tseng and 8-bit color with Trident. man svgalib (SVGAlib?).  
We just put our Cirrus card in a computer for a friend.  
With very new cards you can set a config file for VESA (2.0?)


There was also something about vga=ask when used with lilo, and rdev -v 'a 
terrible hack' and a way to get the videomode you want using a program in 
dosemu.  I will see if booting from DOS with a different mode makes any 
difference to linux but I doubt it.
---------------------

Therefore X should prove quite useful to anyone who wants to use console 
programs in more than 80 columns - for instance links (you have to scroll 
a lot to see tables).  Or to edit wide documents if we can find some 
editor that always has a cursor in X.  

This X in BL3 is a whole lot easier to set up than the one in BL2 if you 
want more than 640 resolution.  Thanks.