[Solved] Virtual terminals/agetty overhanging screen.

Question

I've got a strange problem on my Asus A6Jc lappy with nVidia 7300 Go card and 1280x800 screen. X/Gnome/KDE/Openbox/Whatever is fine and acts normally, but the virtual terminals (Ctrl-Alt-F[1-6]) are bigger than my physical screen (vertically). Not a problem to start with, and even if the terminal is used for more than a few commands, a 'clear' gets it usable again, but opening nano/vi/links chops off the last 4 or 5 lines of text.
I don't think I've done anything particularly strange in the config files, and I've not got the problem in other distros. vbeinfo and hwinfo --framebuffer both give the same results (aside from the +-512 to convert between linux and vesa modes) but these only include 320x240, 640x480, 800x600, and 1024x768 at various bit depths, with no mention of 1280x800. I've searched the forum and google, although, to be fair, I'm not sure of the best things to search for. My /etc/inittab looks sane, and agetty takes no size arguments anyway that I can see. The other thing I've noticed is that the grub terminal works correctly - ie, doesn't overhang, its only the linux virtual terminals. I'm not sure if the boot messages fall off the edge, since they go past too quick for me.
Any ideas where to look?
Last edited by mjc506 (2010-04-09 01:06:54)

Answer 1

On several laptops the kernel option vga=864 or vga=865 will select the widescreen resolution for the framebuffer. However 1280x800 is not an official VESA mode so these codes may or may not work depending on your laptop's manufacturer.
If you use grub to boot other distros that work correctly you might want to take a look at the config file and see what they use as kernel options.