Having spent a morning helping to neaten a server cabinet of a client, I figured it was a good day to neaten a few other things as well. First I did some cabling inside my new Debian box. Then it was time to update my first article on text modes. Wanted to list the effect of various font sizes on the text modes, in case someone was interested in them. In each case I rebooted with the relevant text mode as boot parameter and no font specified in /etc/default/console-setup and loaded the various fonts by hand, eg.
# setfont lat1u-08
Here’s what I found:
08 10 12 14 16
80x25 - 0xF00 (3840) - 80x50 - 80x40 - 80x33 - 80x28 - 80x25
80x50 - 0xF01 (3841) - 80x50 - 80x40 - 80x33 - 80x28 - 80x25
80x43 - 0xF02 (3842) - 80x43 - 80x34 - 80x28 - 80x24 - 80x21
80x28 - 0xF03 (3843) - 80x49 - 80x39 - 80x32 - 80x28 - 80x24
80x30 - 0xF05 (3845) - 80x60 - 80x48 - 80x40 - 80x34 - 80x30
80x34 - 0xF06 (3846) - 80x59 - 80x47 - 80x39 - 80x34 - 80x29
80x60 - 0xF07 (3847) - 80x60 - 80x48 - 80x40 - 80x34 - 80x30
No real surprises with the 80×50, 80×43 or 80×60 modes. 80×28 was the first weird one, which almost seems to first double up the rows (to match 80×50), but then subtracted one row? 80×30 and 80×25 ended up being the same as 80×60 and 80×50, a little bit unexpected. 80×34 continued the weirdness experienced with the 80×28 mode.
I later discovered most of them in /etc/TextConfig (svgatextmode) on my old Debian 4.0/etch box, so maybe they’re not quite as weird. But there you go, try any of the above if you’re looking for a weirdly sized text mode.