Maximum lines and columns on the console

[Hart Larry]

Here is an extensive followup of an earlier message about my 85 lines.  Well, 
now I am enjoying 96--and-here's Dallas to explain
(feel free to forward this to whoever wherever anyone thinks appropriaate.)
  Problem:
  How to maximize the console lines and columns on a Debian system.

  First, thanks to Devon of SFVLUG for determining that the
  screen line column setttings were being limited by
  the console-setup package and font size.
  None of this would of been possible without his breakthrough.

  Every point made below was determined by some systematic
  experimentation and some fumbling around with fortuitous
  observation.
  It took somewhat over 2 hours, with some break time,
  from 6PM to 9PM on a Friday night.
  When I mention 'we', I'm referring to myself and Larry Hart,
  we were working together, him at his local console,
  myself contacting him over the phone and logged in to his machine
  via ssh.

  From

  http://www.shallowsky.com/blog/linux/console-setup-ubuntu.html

  it was found that reboot wasn't necessary to change the console settings.
  We did find though that it was necessary to run the 'setupcon'
  command from the local console, the --force switch didn't seem to
  have the desired effect run via ssh.
  There may be more to this to investigate.

  From the man page for setupcon, the file

  /etc/default/console-setup

  was determined to be the default console-set configuration file.

  From the file

  /usr/share/doc/console-setup/README.Debian

  we determined that console-setup would have precedence over
  console-tools configuration when both are installed.

  Within the console-setup configuration file we found:


  # You can also specify a screen size that setupcon will enforce.  This can not
  # exceed what the current screen resolution can display according to the size of# the
loaded font.
  #
  #  SCREEN_WIDTH=80
  #  SCREEN_HEIGHT=25

  Which sets the columns and lines, within constraints set by
  screen resolution and font size.

  Devon had found that by deactivating the console-setup init.d script
  and setting a font size of 8x9 with console-tools configuration file,
  rebooting, he could get a screen size of 128 columns and 85 lines,
  with the 1024 x 768 resolution returned by fbset.
  This checks out arithmeticly:

  1024 / 8  =  128
  768 / 9   =  85.33333......

  In the comments for the console-setup configuration file,
  we identified a font set that could be activated by:

  FONTFACE="VGA"
  FONTSIZE="8"

  that produced an 8x8 font.
  Below in that file, setting

  SCREEN_WIDTH=128
  SCREEN_HEIGHT=96

  After making sure console-setup's /etc/init./ script was no longer
  deactivated, and running 'setupcon' at the local console,
  this produced a screen size of 128 columns and 96 lines.
  Again this can be arithmeticly verified by:

  1024 / 8  = 128   columns     , for 8 pixels width of the characters
  768 /  8  = 96    lines         for 8 pixels  height of the characters

  At first this was only running on a few virtual consoles.
  To get this running all of the 23 virtual consoles Larry has
  configured for auto-login,
  it was eventually found necessary to change a line towards the top of the
  console-setup configuration file from:

  ACTIVE_CONSOLES="/dev/tty[1-6]"

  to

  ACTIVE_CONSOLES="/dev/tty[1-9] /dev/tty1[0-9] /dev/tty2[0-3]"

  Conclusions:

  1) It might be usefull for Larry to define an alias (for tcsh):

  alias ss='echo $LINES $COLUMNS'

  or perhaps

  alias screensize='echo $LINES $COLUMNS'

  in his ~/.alias file to make testing the screen dimensions faster.

  2) The final character size of the screen can obviously be boosted
  by increasing the screen resolution.   We need to
  determine the physical limits of his hardware to go this route.
  Video card and monitor limits may determine what this can do.

  3) It may also be possible to boost the screen character size
  by going to a smaller font.
  There is provision in the console-setup configuration file for
  pointing to fonts determined by files, instead of anything built
  into console-setup or the kernel.
  There is some mention of braille fonts, which might not be readable
  by most sighted people, but might require fewer bits (pixels),
  and therefore allow a larger screen character size.
  Anyway, this another avenue of further research.


  Again, thanks to Devon and other SFVLUGer's who contributed
  to this effort.


  Regards, Dallas E. Legan II / legan at acm.org / aw585 at lafn.org
  http://isthereanotherquestion.blogspot.com
Hart