[arch-general] Increase console size regardless of screen size

[brent s.]

On 08/27/2017 10:14 AM, Storm Dragon via arch-general wrote:
> Howdy,
> I am blind, and don't even have a screen connected to this computer. For
> some reason, my console size is 30 lines and 80 columns. I've not seen
> this small of a console before. they usually have 50+ lines and over 100
> columns.
> 
> I have searched for quite a while, but not found anything about
> increasing the console size. I did find a python script that will set
> the screen to the actual size, but it returns 30 80 as well, so no luck
> there either. One site said you  could just export the lines and columns
> you want, but that failed, even though the variables were set correctly.
> 
> Is there any way to set the lines and columns regardless of the size
> your computer believes the screen to be?
> Thanks for any help,
> Storm

Storm-

Is this on a braille display via brltty? Or via a screen
reader/TTS/speech synthesizer?

If the former, which model is your braille device?

I have noticed this issue before with VGA framebuffer resolutions (or
KMS mode resolution) being less than ideal, but I'm not quite sure if
brltty does translations *from* the VGA or if it occurs at a lower level
and emulates a VGA display to the kernel. I unfortunately have no
experience with this or frame of reference and no devices to test with
either, but I'd say I'm intrigued by how it handles this.

If brltty does appear as a VGA device to the kernel, I should note that
80x30 is a standard mode of grub legacy (specifically, mode 0f05 or type
4). However, unless you specifically installed and configured your
system to use grub legacy, I can't see that being relevant.

I would try setting:

GRUB_GFXMODE=1024x768x24  # or whatever the max resolution is?
# start conservatively and work your way up
GRUB_GFXPAYLOAD_LINUX=keep

in /etc/default/grub and re-running grub-mkconfig -o /boot/grub/grub.cfg
to see if this makes any difference either way in how it renders to
however you're interacting with it.

Best of luck; do please keep us posted, as I've never interacted with
vision-impaired terminals before so this is new territory for me.

-- 
brent saner
http://www.square-r00t.net

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