From owner-freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG Thu Aug 2 12:46:08 2007 Return-Path: Delivered-To: questions@FreeBSD.org Received: from mx1.freebsd.org (mx1.freebsd.org [IPv6:2001:4f8:fff6::34]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 060F616A41A for ; Thu, 2 Aug 2007 12:46:08 +0000 (UTC) (envelope-from acm@muc.de) Received: from mail.muc.de (colin.muc.de [193.149.48.1]) by mx1.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 67CF813C468 for ; Thu, 2 Aug 2007 12:46:07 +0000 (UTC) (envelope-from acm@muc.de) Received: (qmail 9688 invoked by uid 3782); 2 Aug 2007 12:19:25 -0000 Received: from acm.muc.de (p57B1DD1E.dip.t-dialin.net [87.177.221.30]) by colin2.muc.de (tmda-ofmipd) with ESMTP; Thu, 02 Aug 2007 14:19:23 +0200 Received: (qmail 18278 invoked by uid 1000); 2 Aug 2007 12:20:29 -0000 Date: Thu, 2 Aug 2007 12:20:29 +0000 To: questions@FreeBSD.org Message-ID: <20070802122029.GA17937@muc.de> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Disposition: inline User-Agent: Mutt/1.5.9i X-Delivery-Agent: TMDA/1.1.5 (Fettercairn) From: Alan Mackenzie X-Primary-Address: acm@muc.de Cc: Subject: FreeBSD 6.2. Can I get 128x48 (or similar) console screens? X-BeenThere: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org X-Mailman-Version: 2.1.5 Precedence: list List-Id: User questions List-Unsubscribe: , List-Archive: List-Post: List-Help: List-Subscribe: , X-List-Received-Date: Thu, 02 Aug 2007 12:46:08 -0000 Hi, FreeBSD! I'm a long time GNU/Linux user, and I'm considering changing over to FreeBSD. Why? To escape the upgrade tread-mill. Every time a new Debian release comes out, I say "Oh no, not again!", scarcely looking forward to the weeks of pain getting it to work properly. I'm not sure I prefer the alternative, something like Ubuntu or PCLinux, where you just shut your eyes, lie back and think of South Africa, not knowing quite what's getting installed on your PC. And finding the usable nuggets of information in the vast swathes of Linux documentation scattered diffusely over the Internet isn't fun either. Anyway, back to the point! I do most of my work in Linux on virtual console screens, which are set up at 128x48 characters courtesy of the "framebuffer" thing in the Linux kernel. Previously, I had used SVGATextMode, which did much the same. I just don't much like GUIs, since they are cluttered up with toolbars, dialog boxes, scrollbars, wine bars, start bars, crowbars, ...., and tend to steal key sequences which I want to belong to applications. I haven't found any like facility in 6.2, so far: I downloaded the documentation last night (the CD image 6.2-RELEASE-i386-docs.iso) and had a general browse through it (the English version). It's nicely written, but I didn't find what I was looking for. Then I grepped through it with find . -name "*.txt" | xargs grep '[1-9][0-9]*x[1-9][0-9]*' without finding anything helpful. 80x60 isn't enough! Is it possible I've missed something relevant? Or is there some sort of add-on utility which would give me consoles with (approximately) 128x48? My hardware is a desktop PC with a 1.2 GHz Athlon and a Matrox G400 AGP video card. Thanks in advance for the help! -- Alan Mackenzie (Ittersbach, Germany).