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Change console font and/or size?

I've been wondering how to do this for a while. Because I'm running SuSE 8.1 on a machine from 1998, it's super slow to use XWindows, so I boot into safe mode usually, which is just the console. On start up, it does a 'Loading console font Latin.psfu ... ' routine, and the font changes from the default BIOS font to a more type-writer-ish font. How do I change the font of my console?

I have setfont on my machine,but I don't know what directory to put knew fonts in for this command (/etc/rc.d/rc.d doesn't exist on my machine).

So

1) Where/how do I change my console font?

and

2) What sites are there that share *free* console fonts?

3) How do I change font height?

4) How do I change font width?

On MS-DOS I've been able to change the font with specific *.com files, and in *nix you can use commands.

Please do not tell me this cannot be done, because I know (from experience) that the font on a unix/linux machine can be changed (the boot up of my laptop is an example).

Comments

  • mfillpot
    mfillpot Posts: 2,177
    First I moved this thread to the SUSE section so SUSE users can locate it easier.

    1. I am unaware of how you would do that on an older suse installation because I do not know if is using BSD of systemV style initialization.

    2. I have never looked for console fonts, but the fomat is PSF, so a quick google search should return some results. Documentation about the setfont command can be found at http://linux.about.com/library/cmd/blcmdl8_setfont.htm. Once you determine if the system is using systemV or BSD style initialization you can just append a complete setfont command into an initialization script.

    3,1. Your best bet to change the height and width would not be to focus on those terms, but to change the frambuffer/VGA mode used in the bootloader to change the resolution of the screen which will change how many character can can be displayed.

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