more data on screen

[Ralph W. Reid]

Some time ago, I came across the 'vga=ask' parameter somewhere (don't
remember where now...maybe something in the kernel docs?).  If entered
at the boot prompt, the valid modes for the installed VGA card are
supposed to be displayed in a menu--this is before the kernel is
loaded, so speech does not operate during this selection process.  It
has been a while, but as I recall, I made some guesses, and discovered
that something like choices 0-9 let the system boot with a variety of
lines and columns.  I settled on 'vga=8', which produces a 132X43
screen with the old video card in this system.  I never tried values
higher than 10, so I do not know if anything larger is possible on my
system.  Results on other systems are likely to differ.  I have never
tried any software that allows the use of otherwise invalid
modes--maybe some day I will try experimenting further.

HTH, and have a _great_ day!

On Thu, Sep 16, 2004 at 06:51:19AM -0400, Chuck Hallenbeck wrote:
> This is a progress report that might encourage others to experiment:
> 
> I changed my lilo.conf to use the line
> 
> vga = 791
> 
> instead of
> 
> vga = normal
> 
> and then rebooted. I now have a 128 by 48 character display. When I
> checked to see which applications were working correctly with the new
> screen size, I found that lynx, pine, nano, mutella, less, and the man
> pages, all were correctly resized to the new screen size. My text
> reader, rita the reader, had to have its rita.cfg file changed to the
> new screen parameters, but hey, that's a home made amateur program. So
> far I see no down side to this new setup.
> 
> As for nano, I invoke it with a line length limit of 72 chars, so that
> it wraps at that point, but without that command line option it too
> would use the entire 128 char width. I will retain the 72 char width to
> facilitate printing and emailing.
> 
> I am happy as a clam.
> 
> Chuck
> 
> 
> -- 
> The Moon is Waxing Crescent (4% of Full)
> Home page at http://www.mhcable.com/~chuckh
> Speakfreely address 24.105.197.112:2074

-- 
Ralph.  N6BNO.  Wisdom comes from central processing, not from I/O.
rreid at sunset.net  http://personalweb.sunset.net/~rreid
Opinions herein are either mine or they are flame bait.
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