Somehow along the way, a feature that I’ve had across DOS, OS/2, FreeBSD, and Linux — and has been present on PCs for more than 40 years — is gone.
That feature, of course, is the 80×25 text console.
Linux has, for awhile now, rendered its text console using graphic modes. You can read all about it here. This has been necessary because only PCs really had the 80×25 text mode (Raspberry Pis, for instance, never did), and even they don’t have it when booted with UEFI.
I’ve lately been annoyed that:
The console is a different size on every screen — both in terms of size of letters and the dimensions of it
If a given machine has more than one display, one or both of them will have parts of the console chopped off
My system seems to run with three different resolutions or fonts at different points of the boot process. One during the initrd, and two different ones during the remaining boot.
And, I wanted to run some software on the console that was designed with 80×25 in mind. And I’d like to be able to plug in an old VGA monitor and have it just work if I want to do that.
That shouldn’t be so hard, right? Well, the old vga= option that you are used to doesn’t work when you booted from UEFI or on non-x86 platforms. Most of the tricks you see online for changing resolutions, etc., are no longer relevant. And things like setting a resolution with GRUB are useless for systems that don’t use GRUB (including ARM).
VGA text mode uses 8×16 glyphs in 9×16 cells, where the pixels are non-square, giving a native resolution of 720×400 (which historically ran at 70Hz), which should have streched pixels to make a 4:3 image.
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