console-setup(5) - man - phpMan

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CONSOLE-SETUP(5) Console-setup User's Manual CONSOLE-SETUP(5)

NAME
console-setup - configuration file for setupcon

DESCRIPTION
The file console-setup specifies the encoding and the font to be used by setupcon(1) in order
to setup the console. It can be used also to specify the keyboard layout but it is not rec‐
ommended to do so, use keyboard(5) instead.

The font specification consists of three parameters - codeset, font face and font size. The
codeset specifies what characters will be supported by the font. There isn't one-to-one cor‐
respondence between codeset and encoding, for example the codeset Lat15 is suitable for
ISO 8859-1, ISO 8859-9 and ISO 8859-15. The codesets are two kinds - small and big. Only
small codesets are supported on FreeBSD.

The font face determines the general look of the font. Each font face is available in cer‐
tain possible sizes. On FreeBSD only 8x16, 8x14 and 8x8 are valid sizes. On Linux if frame‐
buffer is not used or consolechars(1) is installed instead of setfont(1), then the permitted
sizes have the form 8xNUMBER.

The console driver of FreeBSD permits fonts in different sizes to be simultaneously loaded.
Which one of them will be actually used depends on the current video mode. Therefore, on
this platform the font size specification will be ignored and setupcon(1) will load the se‐
lected font face in all available sizes.

The file console-setup consists of variable settings in POSIX format:

VARIABLE='VALUE'

Only one assignment is allowed per line. Comments (starting with '#') are also allowed.

OPTIONS
The following variables can be set.

ACTIVE_CONSOLES
Specifies the device files in /dev of the virtual terminals to be configured. File
name wild-cards (*, ?) are allowed. On Linux usually you can set this to
/dev/tty[1-6] and on FreeBSD a sensible value is /dev/ttyv[0-8]. You can assign to
this variable also the special value guess. It will cause setupcon(1) to attempt to
guess the active virtual consoles by looking in configuration files such as /etc/init‐
tab and /etc/ttys. This guessing is not always reliable.

CHARMAP
Specifies the desired encoding on the console. Valid values are: UTF-8, ARMSCII-8,
CP1251, CP1255, CP1256, GEORGIAN-ACADEMY, GEORGIAN-PS, IBM1133, ISIRI-3342,
ISO-8859-1, ISO-8859-2, ISO-8859-3, ISO-8859-4, ISO-8859-5, ISO-8859-6, ISO-8859-7,
ISO-8859-8, ISO-8859-9, ISO-8859-10, ISO-8859-11, ISO-8859-13, ISO-8859-14,
ISO-8859-15, ISO-8859-16, KOI8-R, KOI8-U, TIS-620 and VISCII. The special value guess
is also recognized in which case the system command locale(1) will be used to guess
the desired encoding (currently this works reliably only with GNU libc).

CODESET
In most cases the special value guess can be used here in which case a suitable code‐
set will be guessed. The codeset determines which symbols are supported by the font.
Valid small codesets are: Armenian, CyrAsia, CyrKoi, CyrSlav, Georgian, Greek, Hebrew,
Lao, Lat15, Lat2, Lat38, Lat7 and Thai. Valid big codesets are: Arabic, Ethiopian,
Uni1, Uni2, Uni3 and Vietnamese. Only small codesets can be used on FreeBSD. See be‐
low the section entitled “CODESETS” for detailed description of each of these code‐
sets.

FONTFACE and FONTSIZE
Valid font faces are: VGA (sizes 8x8, 8x14, 8x16, 16x28 and 16x32), Terminus (sizes
6x12, 8x14, 8x16, 10x20, 12x24, 14x28 and 16x32), TerminusBold (sizes 8x14, 8x16,
10x20, 12x24, 14x28 and 16x32), TerminusBoldVGA (sizes 8x14 and 8x16), and Fixed
(sizes 8x13, 8x14, 8x15, 8x16 and 8x18). If however CODESET=Ethiopian, then the
available font faces are Goha and GohaClassic, each in sizes 8x12, 8x14 and 8x16.

Set FONTFACE and FONTSIZE to empty strings if you want to configure only the keyboard
and to leave the console font unchanged.

VIDEOMODE
Set VIDEOMODE to an empty string to avoid setting up the video mode. On FreeBSD you
can run

vidcontrol -i mode

in order to see all possible video modes. On Linux fbset(1) is used to configure the
video mode but very often this doesn't work because the default framebuffer driver
(VesaFB) is rather limited and doesn't allow changes of the video mode.

FONT, FONT_MAP and CONSOLE_MAP
If set, specify that a non standard font is to be used. The value of the variable
FONT consists of one or more space separated font file names. On Linux, when the font
doesn't contain embedded Unicode map, an external map can be specified with the vari‐
able FONT_MAP. The value of CONSOLE_MAP is a file that specifies a translation map
from the user's 8-bit encoding to Unicode (Linux only) or directly to font positions.

SCREEN_WIDTH and SCREEN_HEIGHT
If set, these variables specify a screen size that setupcon(1) will enforce with
stty(1). This can be useful with some braille devices that are only 40 cells wide.
The screen size can not exceed what the current screen resolution can display accord‐
ing to the size of the loaded font.

BEEP This variable controls the style of the system beep on the console. When unset or
when BEEP=default no changes to the system beep will be made. Other possible values
of BEEP are: standard - set a standard beep; short - like the standard beep but some‐
what shorter; shortest - even more short, suitable when your work generates lots of
beeps; polite - a very short beep with low frequency, suitable when there are other
people in the room; attention - a very long beep, suitable when you want to warn your‐
self about an occurring event; annoying - also a long beep, suitable when you want to
warn somebody else about an occurring event; and off - disable the system beep on the
console.

CODESETS
There are two kinds of codesets - small (up to 256 symbols) and big (up to 512 symbols). On‐
ly small codesets can be used on FreeBSD. When the screen is in text mode (i.e. framebuffer
is not used) then fonts covering big codesets will reduce the number of available foreground
colors.

Arabic (a big codeset)
Supported languages: Arabic, Kurdish in Iran, Pashto, Persian and Urdu.

Completely covered by the following font faces: Fixed (size 8x16) and VGA (sizes 8x16 and
16x32).

Armenian
Supported language: Armenian.

Completely covered by the following font faces: Fixed (all sizes).

CyrAsia
This codeset supports some of the non-Slavic Cyrillic languages - Abkhazia, Avaric, Azerbai‐
jani, Bashkir, Buryat, Chechen, Chuvash, Inupiaq (Eskimo), Kara-Kalpak, Kazakh, Kirgiz, Komi,
Kumyk, Kurdish, Lezghian, Mari (Cheremis), Mongolian, Ossetic, Selkup (Ostyak-Samoyed),
Tajik, Tatar, Turkmen, Tuvinian, Uzbek and Yakut.

Completely supported by the following font faces: Fixed (all sizes).

CyrKoi
Supports entirely the 8-bit encodings KOI8-R and KOI8-U. Suitable for Russian and Ukrainian
when one of these two encodings is used.

Completely covered by the following font faces (in all sizes): Fixed, Terminus, TerminusBold,
TerminusBoldVGA and VGA.

CyrSlav
Supports entirely the 8-bit encodings ISO-8859-5 and CP1251. Suitable the Slavic Cyrillic
languages - Belarusian, Bulgarian, Macedonian, Russian, Serbian and Ukrainian. For Serbian
both the Cyrillic and the Latin alphabets are supported.

Completely covered by the following font faces: Fixed (all sizes), Terminus (all sizes), Ter‐‐
minusBold (all sizes), TerminusBoldVGA (all sizes), VGA (sizes 8x16 and 16x32).

Ethiopian (a big codeset)
Supports Amharic, Ethiopic (Geez), Tigre and Tigrinya.

This codeset is partially covered by the following font faces: Fixed (sizes 8x15 and 8x18),
Goha (all sizes) and GohaClassic (all sizes).

Georgian
Supported language: Georgian.

Completely covered by the following font faces: Fixed (all sizes).

Greek
Supported language: Greek.

Completely covered by the following font faces: Fixed (all sizes) and VGA (sizes 8x16 and
16x32).

Hebrew
Supported languages: Hebrew and Yiddish.

Completely covered by the following font faces: Fixed (sizes 8x13, 8x15, 8x16 and 8x18) and
VGA (sizes 8x16 and 16x32).

Lao
Supported languages: Lao.

Completely covered by the following font faces: Fixed (sizes 8x15 and 8x16).

Lat15
Covers entirely ISO-8859-1, ISO-8859-9 and ISO-8859-15. Suitable for the so called Latin1
and Latin5 languages - Afar, Afrikaans, Albanian, Aragonese, Asturian, Aymara, Basque, Bisla‐
ma, Breton, Catalan, Chamorro, Danish, Dutch, English, Estonian, Faroese, Fijian, Finnish,
French, Frisian, Friulian, Galician, German, Hiri Motu, Icelandic, Ido, Indonesian, Interlin‐
gua, Interlingue, Italian, Low Saxon, Lule Sami, Luxembourgish, Malagasy, Manx Gaelic, Norwe‐
gian Bokmal, Norwegian Nynorsk, Occitan, Oromo or Galla, Portuguese, Rhaeto-Romance (Roman‐
sch), Scots Gaelic, Somali, South Sami, Spanish, Swahili, Swedish, Tswana, Turkish, Volapuk,
Votic, Walloon, Xhosa, Yapese and Zulu.

Completely covered by the following font faces: Fixed (all sizes), Terminus (all sizes), Ter‐‐
minusBold (all sizes), TerminusBoldVGA (all sizes), VGA (sizes 8x16 and 16x32).

Lat2
Covers entirely ISO-8859-2. The Euro sign and the Romanian letters with comma below are also
supported. Suitable for the so called Latin2 languages - Bosnian, Croatian, Czech, Hungari‐
an, Polish, Romanian, Slovak, Slovenian and Sorbian (lower and upper).

Completely covered by the following font faces: Fixed (all sizes), Terminus (all sizes), Ter‐‐
minusBold (all sizes), TerminusBoldVGA (all sizes), VGA (sizes 8x16 and 16x32).

Lat38
Covers entirely ISO-8859-3 and ISO-8859-14. Suitable for Chichewa Esperanto, Irish, Maltese
and Welsh.

Completely covered by the following font faces: Fixed (all sizes) and VGA (sizes 8x16 and
16x32).

Lat7
Covers entirely ISO-8859-13. Suitable for Lithuanian, Latvian, Maori and Marshallese.

Completely covered by the following font faces: Fixed (all sizes), Terminus (all sizes), Ter‐‐
minusBold (all sizes), TerminusBoldVGA (all sizes), VGA (sizes 8x16 and 16x32).

Thai
Supported language: Thai.

Completely covered by the following font faces: Fixed (all sizes).

Uni1 (a big codeset)
Supports most of the Latin languages, the Slavic Cyrillic languages, Hebrew and barely Ara‐
bic.

Completely covered by the following font faces: Fixed (sizes 8x15 and 8x16) and VGA (all
sizes).

Uni2 (a big codeset)
Supports most of the Latin languages, the Slavic Cyrillic languages and Greek.

Completely covered by the following font faces: Fixed (all sizes) and VGA (sizes 8x16 and
16x32).

Uni3 (a big codeset)
Supports most of the Latin and Cyrillic languages.

Completely covered by the following font faces: Fixed (all sizes).

Vietnamese (a big codeset)
Supported language: Vietnamese.

Completely covered by the following font faces: Fixed (sizes 8x13, 8x15, 8x16 and 8x18).

FILES
The standard location of the console-setup configuration file is /etc/default/console-setup.
The keyboard configuration is in /etc/default/keyboard. Fonts that can be used with the
variable FONT are usually installed in /usr/share/consolefonts/ or /usr/share/syscons/fonts/.
Translation maps that can be used with the variable CONSOLE_MAP are usually installed in
/usr/share/consoletrans/ or /usr/share/syscons/scrnmaps/.

NOTES
The aim of the Terminus font is to reduce the eyes-fatigue when one has to read a lot. Cur‐
rently this font supports only the Latin, the Cyrillic and the Greek scripts (the Lat15,
Lat2, Lat7, CyrAsia, CyrKoi, CyrSlav, Greek, Uni2 and Uni3 codesets).

The fonts with font face TerminusBoldVGA are optimized for use with regular text video modes.
They should not be used with framebuffer video modes. The fonts with font face TerminusBold
are optimized for use with the framebuffer video modes. The fonts with font face Terminus
can be used in all video modes.

SEE ALSO
setupcon(1), keyboard(5), setfont(8), vidcontrol(1)

console-setup 2011-03-17 CONSOLE-SETUP(5)