How to make Console screen resolution back to VGA
 

Hi

At Lilo menu and while Slackware 15 is booting up, I see text with big fonts. I think the screen is VGA resolution.

Then, at certain point, the screen switches to high resolution. Then, I get the login prompt. Is it possible to not go to high resolution? But stay at VGA until I startx.

Try adding "nomodeset" to your kernel boot options.

As mentioned, the short answer is forcing the kernel to use BIOS video modes by adding the nomodeset boot parameter.

A longer answer is something called kernel mode setting (KMS). In years past only the BIOS video modes were supported at boot. Then people decided that native video card modes should be supported during booting rather than only when the graphical environment is launched. A reasonable idea but then computer monitors started getting bigger. This creates a visual challenge with displaying tiny fonts.

Many people don't care because many people configure Linux systems to boot into graphical user mode rather than boot to console like the olden days. Further, many distro maintainers use a boot splash to hide the boot spew and most users never see the small fonts. Slackware does not use a boot splash. Hence the small fonts.

While nomodeset is a handy sledge hammer, that probably is not what many people want. Many people also use Slackware in servers and no graphical environment is installed. The solution to avoid the small fonts is in /etc/rc.d/rc.font.

The default rc.font looks like this:

setfont -v

Not much help with those small fonts.

The script can be edited to display larger font sizes and different fonts. For example:

setfont -v ter-124n

That change will use a 24 point Terminus font.

Configuring that script might require some experimenting because not all fonts or font sizes succeed well with some display drivers.

After editing rc.font, the visual result is the system will 1) boot with a BIOS supported resolution and font, 2) when the rc.udev script executes the display will belch and the small fonts will appear, and 3) later in the boot sequence the rc.font script will be executed and the display font will adjust as defined in that script.

I hope that helps.

Agreed, nomodeset is not the most elegant solution, but will do what you are wanting. but a better solution would be to choose a larger console font. Log out of X and run setconsolefont, there you can preview as many fonts as you like until you find one that works for you.

You can also use the parameter

in /etc/lilo.conf, then relaunch lilo to see the changes at the next reboot.

Yeah I tried nomodeset and it worked and it made the console font nice and big.

When I do startx, there's a wierd flash and graphics turned crazy for a second and then everything looks normal. But when I run Youtube on Firefox, the CPU load is very high.

Yeah instead of nomodeset, I made the font bigger using /etc/rc.d/rc.font. The biggest font is size 22. This is fine for my current laptop. I imagine some poeple might prefer an even bigger font.