Re: Problems with bold colour display in text mode

[Jim Holland <mc mango zw>]

Hi

On Tue, 22 Nov 2005, Leonard den Ottolander kindly wrote:

> On Tue, 2005-11-22 at 22:31 +0200, Jim Holland wrote:
> > Lack of bold colours is a problem that I have come across with a number of
> > recent Linux distributions, including RHEL clones, Fedora Core 4, etc.
>
> Please compare
> https://bugzilla.redhat.com/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=71958 . See if the
> solutions proposed in comments #5 and #6 solve your problem.

This is exactly the information I wanted - thanks very much.

The first option:

        modprobe vga16fb

works fine from the command line, but should be put into rc.local and 
followed by "service gpm start" to get the mouse to work correctly.

I think the second option is more elegant - appending commands to the 
kernel line in the boot loader, eg "linux vga=nnn" for Grub or just 
"vga=nnn" for Lilo.  The values of nnn that I found useful were:

769 (640x480 mode) gives a good font size for a 14 inch screen, with 30 rows
771 (800x600 mode) has a slightly smaller font, with 37 rows
773 (1024x768 mode) and 775 (1280x1024) can also be used.

The above settings are for 256 colours, which is more than enough for text 
mode.

The only issue I came across was that the gpm mouse cursor did not display
reverse video correctly, so the cursor itself looks a little odd at times.  
However highlighting was fine, so I can live with that.

Thanks again for a solution to this annoying problem.  I had previously 
looked at using a frame buffer but had tried the modes that appear when 
using the "vga=ask" command and found that they did not solve the problem.

Regards

Jim Holland
System Administrator
MANGO - Zimbabwe's non-profit e-mail service