Re: [gentoo-amd64] Re: Terminal control codes

[Peter Humphrey <prh@gotadsl.co.uk>]

On Wednesday 03 January 2007 04:06, Duncan wrote:

> You may be looking for the video= parameters, in particular
> video=scrollback.  See section 5.2 of the bootprompt HOWTO, here:
> http://tldp.org/HOWTO/text/BootPrompt-HOWTO.

Ah. Thanks for the pointer.

> Second and this is what was actually preventing me scrolling back further
> for awhile, if you reset the console font (Gentoo's consolefont service),
> it resets the scroll buffer.  Since the consolefont service starts
> relatively late in the process, using it means you lose most of the
> boot-time scrollback, altho you can still get most of the info from
> syslog and/or dmesg -- but not that last bit of grub output! =8^(

I was using locales to give me ISO-8859-1 and -15 character sets, but glibc 
is buggy in this area and I've had to keep recreating the locales with 
localedef. Now it occurs to me to use UTF-8, so I shouldn't need the 8859 
codes. Thus it becomes feasible to try removing the console-font service - 
thanks again.

> In addition to setting vga=0x0133 for a normal 132x44 character console
> (720x400 px), I /had/ been setting the consolefont to gr737c-8x6, giving
> me an even higher resolution while still very readable, but I've disabled
> that now, sticking with 132x44, so I can scrollback the entire boot when
> necessary.

I use vga=0x31A on this 19", 1600x1200 flat panel. If I run nvidia-drivers 
this gives me a screen of 160x 64, or if I use the nv kernel module I get 
200x75. I find both of those legible, though the latter is getting a bit 
small - and of course all that screen redrawing takes time in a long 
emerge.

-- 
Rgds
Peter
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