Digressing from the subject a bit...

John Forkosh <forkosh@panix.com> writes:

> Let me now infer that you're using a lot of those Fn consoles due to
> your up-to-now use of that 19" crt, where trying to run multiple
> terminals in X leaves each one too small to be easily readable.

I'm 81 years old so your notion of "too small to be easily readable"
and mine may differ markedly. :-)

With a 24" 16:9 monitor, I run it in 1280x720 mode for most purposes.
An 80 col x 30 line xterm or emacs fills ca. 3/4 of the real
estate. With twm, there's no taskbar and I keep windows not currently
in use iconified to one side along w/ xclock, perhaps xload etc.
Otherwise, windows in use overlap. Text is easily readable
(-sony-fixed-medium-r-normal--24-230-75-75-c-120-iso8859-1 in xterms &
emacs).

This is essentially what I did routinely w/ the 19" CRT except there
wasn't an extra 25% real estate.

To watch a movie, I have a script that uses xrandr to switch the wide
monitor to 1920x1080 mode. Text isn't easily readable but a movie is
fine.

But that's all on a new (to me) box with Slack 15.0 and IS NOT WHERE
I HAVE THE PROBLEM.

What was my main machine until now also has a replacement flat screen
monitor, an old 19" 5:4 one given to me. X works on it in 1024x768
mode (which is somehow auto-selected and is incorrect for the hardware
aspect ratio, giving readable text but egg-ic circles) or 1280x1024
(which has round circles but less easily readable text.) So X is
okay.

On that machine (P4, Slack 14.2, i915 graphics) the virtual consoles
have lovely big text (ter-232b set in /etc/rc.d/rc.font).

But (for example) the top 3 lines of a manpage rendered in less(1) are
covered by bit snow. The software thinks it's sending those lines to
be rendered but they aren't. Scrolling down moves other lines into the
bit snow region.

> But I think you'll find the situation changed with your 24" led.
> Try it, and see if that's more convenient.

On the new 16:9 monitor in 1920x1080 mode I can put two 80x25 xterms
completely on-screen and two more mostly on-screen but I got the 24"
monitor expressly so that I don't have to read text that small. So I
use 1280x720.

Summary: New 16:9 24" monitor w/ Slack 15: all okay.

Old 19" 5:4 monitor w/ Slack 14.2: Virtual consoles fail;
everything else okay.

> I prefer /usr/bin/konsole...

That's part of KDE isn't it? I have never installed KDE except by
accident with my very first Linux box -- Caldera. Moved to Slackware
with twm and never looked back.

Thanks for taking an interest. But my 14.2 backup box w/ the 5:4
monitor is still deficient. fbset(8) claims to do things that might
fix it but I get error messages beyond my pay grade to interpret.

--
Mike Spencer Nova Scotia, Canada

Mike Spencer <mds@bogus.nodomain.nowhere> wrote:
> What was my main machine until now also has a replacement flat screen
> monitor, an old 19" 5:4 one given to me. X works on it in 1024x768
> mode (which is somehow auto-selected and is incorrect for the hardware
> aspect ratio, giving readable text but egg-ic circles) or 1280x1024
> (which has round circles but less easily readable text.) So X is
> okay.
>
> On that machine (P4, Slack 14.2, i915 graphics) the virtual consoles
> have lovely big text (ter-232b set in /etc/rc.d/rc.font).
>
> But (for example) the top 3 lines of a manpage rendered in less(1) are
> covered by bit snow. The software thinks it's sending those lines to
> be rendered but they aren't. Scrolling down moves other lines into the
> bit snow region.

Your original post (from which your response above became unglued)
while it did say "random bits" that wording was not explicit enough to
indicate "snow" to the rest of us here. I've been thinking your issue
was the top three lines of the text consoles are positioned off the top
of the screen, not just a mess of bit snow. Which was why I suggested
the "sizing controls" that I expected the old monitor to have.

Snow (as in random sparkling on/off pixel changes to what should
otherwise be a clear image) implies some hardware issue. What cable
type are you using to connect the old monitor? If it is a VGA cable
you might try double checking the connection (or even try a different
cable) to see if that makes a difference.

Also, how do you have the system booting? Via LILO? If yes, what do
you have in /etc/lilo.conf for the "vga=" setting. If you have
vga=normal, do you get the same snow on the top lines at the LILO
screen?

If no, and if the lilo screen text size is acceptable, then you might
try disabling the frame buffer console on the system connected to the
old monitor to see if using the plain VGA console fixes the snow issue.

Another option would be to try to reconfigure the frame buffer console
to use one of the modes that seems to work with X (1024x768 or
1280x1024). The snow could very well be an artifact of the actual mode
the frame buffer console picks being either a buggy mode in your video
chipset (i.e., your description sounds like you are describing CGA snow
from the CGA days), or a mode the monitor does not like, and a
different mode might eliminate the snow.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Color_Graphics_Adapter

The higher bandwidth used by 80-column text mode results in random
short horizontal lines appearing onscreen (known as "snow") if a
program writes directly to video memory during screen drawing. The
BIOS avoids the problem by only accessing the memory during
horizontal retrace, or by temporarily turning off the output during
scrolling. While this causes the display to flicker, IBM decided
that doing so was better than snow.[2] The "snow" problem does not
occur on any other video adapter, or on most CGA clones.

Mike Spencer <mds@bogus.nodomain.nowhere> wrote:
> I'm 81 years old so your notion of "too small to be easily readable"
> and mine may differ markedly. :-)
>
> With a 24" 16:9 monitor, I run it in 1280x720 mode for most purposes.
> An 80 col x 30 line xterm or emacs fills ca. 3/4 of the real
> estate. With twm, there's no taskbar and I keep windows not currently
> in use iconified to one side along w/ xclock, perhaps xload etc.
> Otherwise, windows in use overlap. Text is easily readable
> (-sony-fixed-medium-r-normal--24-230-75-75-c-120-iso8859-1 in xterms &
> emacs).

This font will be 30% bigger, try:

xterm -xrm '*fullscreen: True' +sb -fn -xos4-terminus-bold-r-normal--32-320-72-72-c-160-iso10646-1

A full screen xterm is equivalent to the console. You can toggle
fullscreen mode with the keybinding Alt-Enter. And I'm sure you
can find bigger fonts if you look for them.