I (debian-based distro) login to do some file admin, and ofen boot into console and run midnight commander mc.

in tty1, mc views out badly, with liines going askew as I go down the list.

however if I go into tty2, thgat problem doesn't exist.

How can see the different screen configs of tty1 and tty2 so I can see what the root problem is?

I also would like to know how to recue the size of the font seen in mc, so that I can view more of the fiile name in mc?

It must be a screen resolution prob, what files should I be looking at to sort it out?

May it even be an ncurses problem? Anybody knwos how to fine-tune ncurses?

Not looking for solutions, just pointers.

1. look at the basic console font setup at boot time - there are lots of them to choose from
2. look at the video mode used by your boot manager - 640x480, 800x600 etc...
tty1 is usually stdout for system messages so I don't use it much as a working console anyway.

thanks Tuttle.

Yes I remembered the options one can pass to the kernel at boot-time (easy to forget them and they can be so useful!).

Whereupon vga=791 did what I was looking for (in grub's menu.lst)

I'll have to check your point 1. I don't actually know WHERE console's basic fonts are set. I expect inittab ...? I'll do the usual searching around and testing and rebooting and all that stuff ...

Didn't know that about tty1.