Console screen font very small in openSUSE 11.3

[jimsvoboda]

What's happening to the console screen resolution in version 11.3? I have been using an 80x24 character console screen to run character based software and I want 80x24 to fill the whole screen. To do that, I have chosen "text mode" on the initial dvd boot up screen (F3 before choosing install). Choosing a higher resolution installation produces gui installation screens and results in console screens with progressively higher resolution, smaller type and more characters/line and lines/page, as the gui resolution increases. The installation resolution does not seem to affect the xwindows resolution. However, when I installed ver 11.3 using the text mode installation, the console screens alt-F1 to alt-F6 had very small text and the 80x24 text area fit in a small rectangle in the upper left corner of the screen. How can I fix this? My system is an Asus M4A785-M motherboard with a 2.8 ghz quad core athlon II, using the onboard ATI Radeon HD 4200 GPU.

[gogalthorp]

You can set the vga resolution in the kernel startup string in /boot/grub/menu.lst

here is a table of resolutions

VESA BIOS Extensions - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

[jimsvoboda]

I read the wiki you suggested and used yast to add vga=0x0301 (640x480) to the proper location in menu.lst and rebooted. I found that vga=-0301 was added to the Boot Options line on the initial boot screen. After reboot the console screen font size remained very small. The resolution had not changed. Also, the xwindows showed no change. I tried using many different values for vga, but it seemed to have no effect on the console screen resolution. I found two bug reports on lists.opensuse.org, Bug 621447 and Bug 619803 that are related. Any other ideas on how to solve this problem? Has anyone else seen this behavior in 11.3?

[gogalthorp]

Xwindows does not change- that is a different system. The vga setting only effect the terminals. So maybe I do not understanding what you want to change. Are you talking about the consoles?

Try using the decimal values

[jimsvoboda]

I tried using decimal numbers, but still no joy. The console screens still have a very small font and 80x25 is a small rectangle in the upper left of the screen. It appears that SUSE's resolution to this problem (bug 619803) is "WON'T FIX" Here is the text of a response to bug 619803 by Stefan Dirsch.

"Well, we have KMS active meanwhile. I'm not aware of any tools to figure out
the current resolution on the console. Depending on that you would need to load
an appropriate font. What if you switch the resolution in X? Then you would
need to load a different font on the console. These are all issues nobody (also
upstream) didn't think about when developing KMS. I'm afraid you need to disable
KMS('nomodeset') if you still need to rely on Linux console. ==> WONTFIX"

[gogalthorp]

I don't under stand this because if in terminal mode ie start with boot option 3. XWindows does not run. The terminal is running using the framebuffer driver. This is controlled by the vga= setting.

Opening a command line console in a GUI is another story. In this case Xwindows is involved.

I'm still running 11.2 so can not check the problem here at this time. But with 11.2 it works fine.

[jimsvoboda]

I have used 11.2 and found it behaves as expected. However, 11.3 will not allow changing the console resolution using vga=xxx. Also, sax2 does not exist on 11.3.