Making Consoles Great Again - Printable Version

Making Consoles Great Again - Printable Version

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Making Consoles Great Again - jmorris - 10-31-2020

The console is dead, especially on a phone. Right? It is Halloween so lets bring it back to life

One of the things I want to have is the ability to keep a small BT keyboard around and be able to remote admin, instead of always having a laptop on hand. Well none of the graphical terminals work well on PinePhone so what to do? How about the console? With a little attention it can be made usable! That pic is ssh into a remote system and editing a PHP file with vim.

Install the kbd package first. Then we need to make the text readable and landscape mode. Easy enough.

Modify /etc/init.d/consolefont:

Code:
# Added 201031 by jmorris@beau.org to get a more usable

# console on a PinePhone.  (Using a BT keyboard)

# Also added the extraparam in the setfont invocation below.

echo 1 >/sys/devices/virtual/graphics/fbcon/rotate_all

[ -d /dev/vc ] && ttydev=/dev/vc/

x=1

while [ $x -le $ttyn ]; do

# Added extraparam to get a more readable spacing with the -h option

if ! setfont $consolefont $extraparam $param -C $ttydev$x >/dev/null; then

Then /etc/conf.d/consolefont:

Code:
consolefont="sun12x22.psfu.gz"

extraparam="-h28"

Finally, enable the consolefont service:

Code:
rc-update add consolefont boot

This gets you an almost perfect 120x25 terminal window without any loss of vertical space to multiple bars of unneeded cruft. Alt-F7 gets back to the phone interface.