How to change resolution of virtual terminal?
How can I rescale the Linux virtual terminals (ctrl + alt + {f1, f2, f3, f4, f5, f6}), so that a high-resolution display doesn't make the letters too small?
I'd like to use 1080 or even 720 resolution in virtual terminals (and only there; I want native resolution in ctrl + alt + f7).
If that matters, I use Debian Trixie.
2 answers
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The following users marked this post as Works for me:
| User | Comment | Date |
|---|---|---|
| alx | (no comment) | Nov 10, 2023 at 23:18 |
I think that you have two options.
The literal answer would be to pass video= to the kernel. For example, you could pass video=720x400 to run the framebuffer at a 720x400 resolution, assuming that the specified resolution is supported by your hardware. See modedb default video mode support and Kernel Mode Setting: forcing modes. I'm not sure how this would interact with X or Wayland.
The better answer is probably still to set a larger font for the console virtual terminals, as modern displays provide the best experience when run at exactly their native resolution, whatever that happens to be in your case. You mentioned in a comment thread that you can't make the font much larger, but I suspect that you're trying to also keep the Fixed font. Try editing /etc/default/console-setup to indicate something along the lines of
CHARMAP="UTF-8"
CODESET="Lat15"
FONTFACE="TerminusBold"
FONTSIZE="16x32"
and run /usr/bin/setupcon to apply the changes. (See also setupcon(1) for some command-line switches to make the changes less invasive while experimenting.) There's also Terminus (non-bold) if you prefer that. To determine the available font sizes, you can either run dpkg-reconfigure console-setup and go through the guide, or look in /usr/share/consolefonts; for example, on my Debian Bookworm system, I have these Lat15 TerminusBold fonts available:
- Lat15-TerminusBold14.psf.gz
- Lat15-TerminusBold16.psf.gz
- Lat15-TerminusBold18x10.psf.gz
- Lat15-TerminusBold20x10.psf.gz
- Lat15-TerminusBold22x11.psf.gz
- Lat15-TerminusBold24x12.psf.gz
- Lat15-TerminusBold28x14.psf.gz
- Lat15-TerminusBold32x16.psf.gz
which would map to size values of 14, 16, 18x10, 20x10, 22x11, 24x12, 28x14 and 32x16. On present-day Debian, these fonts are provided by the console-setup-linux package which you should already have installed on your system.
The following users marked this post as Works for me:
| User | Comment | Date |
|---|---|---|
| alx | (no comment) | Nov 11, 2023 at 15:56 |
This isn't exactly what you asked, but the letters-too-small problem could also be solved by using a larger console font.
Here is a decent overview of how to change console fonts, though I don't know which of the console-setup and the vconsole.conf approaches is correct for your distribution.
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