Hi.

When I had a desktop environment installed everything went to the edge of the screen. Now on my IBM-T20-2647 with a newly installed Debian-netinst (I want to use CLI only) the screen acts as if margined i.e: blank inch or so at top and bottom, quarter on both sides and text crunched in the middle? I'm having trouble coming up with a good search term to find a solution. I've tried looking at configs like /etc/default/console-setup with variables SCREEN_WIDTH and SCREEN_HEIGHT but also trying to change font there does nothing so I tested by commenting out most lines there and still no changes? To change the font I've put this line of code in my root and users home folders .profileand thought that the font may dictated screen size but all fonts stay in the box?

If anyone can help I would greatly appreciate it.

Hi. Perhaps this has to do with the Kernel Mode Setting? You might try to disable it by appending the kernel parameter "nomodeset" to GRUB's kernel line. I would do this in the GRUB prompt first, to see if it has any effect.

Hi there,

I'm fairly sure I know what you mean - and if I'm right it hasn't to do with any configuration issue, but purely with hardware settings. But let me strike out a little bit to explain.

If you run a system with CLI only, the graphics adapter is typically operated in pure text mode. Pure text mode usually organizes the screen in 25 lines consisting of 80 characters, each character box being made up of 9 pixels horizontally and 16 pixels vertically. That's a total resolution of 720x400.

Well, most LCD screens have a higher resolution - often 1024x768 at 15", or 1280x1024 at 17", or 1368x768 on a small 16:9 display, or 1024x600 on a small netbook display. All these resolutions are higher than plain VGA text mode. So what does an LCD screen do when operated at such a relatively low resolution?
Some will automatically stretch the image to fit the entire display. That's probably what you automatically expected.
Some do not scale the image, but simply display the 720x400 image unscaled on a much bigger screen - that's probably what you're experiencing.
And if you're very lucky, your display can be configured to do either of the two thing explained above.

Once again: This is not a setting of the driver or any other piece of software - it's a behavior that's embedded in the display itself.

[X] Doc CPU

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Hi, Thanks.

I did see something about using GRUB to set font and maybe fix my problem, screen resolution , "nomodeset" at the end of the linux /boot/... line did not work tho?

I am currently trying things from this page: http://askubuntu.com/questions/33784...inals-ttys-1-6 ...

So, I should definitely try installing the Video driver (SavageIX8) that I can't believe I have not tried yet it worked in GUI and I guess it never occurred to me in CLI...

As an alternative, you might try grabbing one of the no-X versions at LinuxBBQ (based on Debian sid):

http://linuxbbq.org/about.html

I recommend the Spring 2014 release, or Boring (based on Debian stable):

http://sourceforge.net/projects/linuxbbq/files/2014/
http://sourceforge.net/projects/linuxbbq/files/noX/

These are great releases for CLI-only computing, either in framebuffer, tty, or tmux.

Got it, in /etc/default/grub I put:then:and reboot... sweet.

You need to turn of kernel framebuffer, not sure if your kernel has it. Generic UVESA should do it. That is if you can configure your kernel to enable it.

Edit: But than again, why not access this node over SSH and eliminate all display issues.

Thanks, I will look in to it:
https://www.linux.com/learn/docs/ldp...mebuffer-howto
https://www.kernel.org/doc/Documenta...ramebuffer.txt
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linux_framebuffer

...for now it works well it even made the text smaller like I wanted.