Date: Thu, 2 Aug 2007 16:46:49 +0300 From: Nikos Vassiliadis <nvass@teledomenet.gr> To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Cc: Alan Mackenzie <acm@muc.de>, questions@freebsd.org Subject: Re: FreeBSD 6.2. Can I get 128x48 (or similar) console screens? Message-ID: <200708021646.49965.nvass@teledomenet.gr> In-Reply-To: <20070802122029.GA17937@muc.de> References: <20070802122029.GA17937@muc.de>
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On Thursday 02 August 2007 15:20, Alan Mackenzie wrote: > Hi, FreeBSD! > > I'm a long time GNU/Linux user, and I'm considering changing over to > FreeBSD. Why? To escape the upgrade tread-mill. Every time a new > Debian release comes out, I say "Oh no, not again!", scarcely looking > forward to the weeks of pain getting it to work properly. You may have the very same problems using FreeBSD. > I'm not sure > I prefer the alternative, something like Ubuntu or PCLinux, where you > just shut your eyes, lie back and think of South Africa, not knowing > quite what's getting installed on your PC. That's not a very nice comment to do. Please, keep your feelings about continents/countries/Linux distributions out of here. > And finding the usable > nuggets of information in the vast swathes of Linux documentation > scattered diffusely over the Internet isn't fun either. That's a problem you won't have with FreeBSD. > > Anyway, back to the point! I do most of my work in Linux on virtual > console screens, which are set up at 128x48 characters courtesy of the > "framebuffer" thing in the Linux kernel. Previously, I had used > SVGATextMode, which did much the same. I just don't much like GUIs, > since they are cluttered up with toolbars, dialog boxes, scrollbars, > wine bars, start bars, crowbars, ...., and tend to steal key sequences > which I want to belong to applications. There are dozens of window managers you can choose from. Not all of them have bells and whistles. You could try ion wm, which is a very minimal window manager. > I haven't found any like facility in 6.2, so far: I downloaded the > documentation last night (the CD image 6.2-RELEASE-i386-docs.iso) and > had a general browse through it (the English version). It's nicely > written, but I didn't find what I was looking for. Then I grepped > through it with > > find . -name "*.txt" | xargs grep '[1-9][0-9]*x[1-9][0-9]*' > > without finding anything helpful. 80x60 isn't enough! > > Is it possible I've missed something relevant? Or is there some sort of > add-on utility which would give me consoles with (approximately) 128x48? You'll probably have to build the kernel yourself. Read vidcontrol manual page. It boils down to this: You have to add VESA support and raster text mode support to your kernel. Read this: http://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/showthread.php?t=366057 Keep in mind that the above guide, recommends upgrading. You don't have to upgrade, just build your kernel with what is needed. HTH, Nikos
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