Running Debian testing (systemd) - after upgrading my Nvidia drivers, xorg wouldn't start, so I purged everything nvidia related and installed an older version of the Nvidia driver. That fixed the xorg starting problem.

But when I rebooted, the console font had changed (the TTY console, not terminal run in a window inside xorg). Now it's a different font, and much sharper than the earlier console font.

So that got me wondering how downgrading a driver would change the console font. Where is the actual console font set, and how can I see the font name and size?

/usr/share/kbd/consolefonts . setfont sets the font; showfont shows what the character set looks like in that font.

Thanks RandomTroll!

In Debian apparently it's /usr/share/consolefonts

But that dir just contains a bunch of fonts - do you know what config file (or systemd setting?) actually shows what is being set at console startup?

If it's doing it with setfont, the manpage of setfont doesn't say where it's used during startup.

See this article, chapter "Changing Fonts".

However, this:
has me wondering if the font has changed at all; what you decribe sounds like the console was running on a lower resolution before.

What do those Debianistas know?


In Slackware it's set by /etc/rc.d/rc.font. Slackware has fonts named Default in its fonts directory; perhaps those get used by default.

Hi,

on Debian it's /etc/default/console-setup

Evo2.

That is possible, the text is much smaller now. But I don't know where the console resolution is set, either. Back to the drawing board, lol.

If you use lilo, it's set in /etc/lilo.conf. The same resolution can have different numbers of columns and rows with fonts of different sizes. Change to a different then run showconsolefont.

The Debian kernel will automatically set the framebuffers to a 16X9 font and use the display's native mode. As touched on by evo2, Debian has it's own idea which font should be used via /etc/default/console-setup, but that doesn't ever mess with resolution AFAIK. When I want a different mode, I include it on the linu line(s) in Grub, e.g. video=1440x900.

It's good if it's high res & sharp, don't change it.
You probably just need a larger font.
You have been given several suggestions on how to do that on Debian now. Try them and report back in full detail, thank you.