info pages - wrong blackscreen font?

[lugoteehalt]

The info pages - many of the lines are too long and finish a little way along the line below. (Incidentally single quotes or quotes, I think, are replaced by a white rectangle.) They are difficult to read. This has happened, I think, since the installation of Etch.

How to put this right? If it's that the font's too big - it does not happen in X - then where and what to do to fix that? Anything to do with the environment variable COLUMNS? Thanks any help.

[mzilikazi]

Unless I have misunderstood, you are referring to the kernel messages that scroll as you boot. If so, you can easily change this with a boot time parameter. I will assume you are using GRUB to boot. You can add a vga=XXX to the kernel line in /boot/grub/menu.lst. For example:

title           Debian GNU/Linux, kernel 2.6.22-mz
root            (hd0,1)
kernel          /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.22-mz root=/dev/sda2 ro vga=791
initrd          /boot/initrd.img-2.6.22-mz
savedefault

If your system is not capable of that resolution then try another. This should help:

640x480 - 785
800x600 - 788
1024x768 - 791
1152x864 - 355
1280x1024 - 794
1600x1200 - 798

So if you wanted 800x600 you would add vga=788 to the kernel line in boot/grub/menu.lst

[lugoteehalt]

Thanks.

In fact I was talking about the manual pages, although 'man tar', for example is reasonably all right, but 'info tar' would be very difficult to read. But it's a good idea that might fix it; I'll try it.

[lugoteehalt]

Yes, it worked. But higher resolutions too small for eyesight so used 640x480; this improves things but doesn't remedy them all together.

[mzilikazi]

Oh my bad. You really did mean info pages. Well which terminal are you using? There should be some configuration. If you're using xterm I would suggest trying out one of many terminals that are far better. I guess that's not really an answer but I don't know how to change font size any other way.

Eterm, Mrxvt, Gnome terminal, Konsole, (KDE terminal) and most others can easily be configured to use a different font size from the menu.

[lugoteehalt]

Thanks. It's all right now, not perfect but liveable with.

It works perfectly in an Eterm, but I'm so hair shirt I like to use the black screen outside X, that's where the problem is.