Fix for Login Text Size Too Small (tuigreet)

MNT Pocket Reform
1

Got my Pocket Reform and had a great weekend getting to know it. I’m really impressed with the fit & finish of the device, and the MNT folks have clearly put a lot of work into making this hackable. Huge thank you to the MNT team for all their hard work.

As I’m modifying a lot of software on the device, I’m rebooting a lot. When the kernel boots, the kernel logs messages are a bit too small for my old eyes. I tried several fixes, but in the end, simply changing:

/etc/default/console-setup

FONTSIZE="8x16"

to:

FONTSIZE="32x16"

gave me a font size in both the kernel boot and the greeter that was more readable.

For the greeter, I also tried gtkgreet as an alternative to tuigreet. It worked great, however I couldn’t figure out how to get the screen to rotate from portrait to landscape. Gtkgreet does not (like tuigreet) use a virtual console. Instead it relies on a Wayland compositor. I chose Cage to keep things simple. Cage loads, passes off to gtkgreet, and I can use CSS to make the font larger. For some reason the display is in portrait mode, and I noticed this gets flipped in the sway config to “landscape”. I’m going to go out on a limb and say that this screen is probably set up to be a tablet or a phone, not a laptop. :grin:

I know cage has support for wlr_output_management, but I’d already learned way more about login managers and greeters than I cared to, so I gave up and fell back on my console-setup fix and tuigreet. While gtkgreet was much more flexible than tuigreet, I actually like the look & feel, and simplicity of tuigreet.

Anyway, hope this helps folks who are interested in changing their login manager, or simply those with old eyes like mine.

Cheers!

2

Hello @stephano and welcome to the forum!

It is also too tiny for young eyes I’d say. There have been many attempts to find a solution to this issue for more than half a year now. Earliest mention as far as I can see is here: 2023-06-11.log

Attempts to fix this include:

The issue is a tricky one and I’m not really in a good place to fix this as I do not own a Pocket Reform myself. Can you tell me what this outputs on your system:

cat /proc/cmdline

If that includes the parameter fbcon=font:TER16x32 then you could try to set FONTSIZE and FONTFACE to the empty string, essentially the equivalent of running:

sed -i -e "s/^FONTFACE=.*/FONTFACE=/" -e "s/^FONTSIZE=.*/FONTSIZE=/" /etc/default/console-setup

So that in the end, /etc/default/console-setup includes:

FONTFACE=
FONTSIZE=

With that being set, you should automatically get the 32x16 font when booting as that was set on the kernel cmdline by u-boot.

There was an attempt to make these settings via a postinst maintainer script but somehow that didn’t work for some people and we are not yet sure why.

It also seems that the current hook in reform-system-image which does the equivalent of the above is not effective either.

I’m looking for somebody who can submit a patch that fixes this for good and unfortunately I am not the right person to fix this, unfortunately. :frowning_face:

Using an actual GUI and not TUI greeter is an option but as you have noted, is not so easy to set up due to screen rotation. If you or somebody else finds a fix, using a gtk based greeter could be something that we can talk about.

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3

I have just been dealing with this issue in the opposite direction on my desktop system. Apparently the current kernel behavior is to use a huge font if you’re on a hidpi display, and a small font on regular dpi displays. In addition to the above guidance, you can use the following on debian: sudo dpkg-reconfigure console-setup

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4

Wow, glad to hear I’m not alone on this one. I can see how abstracting this concept out for a system build would be tough. Also, “that didn’t work for some people and we are not yet sure why” should be an option in bugzilla. :slight_smile:

cat /proc/cmdline

Gives me this:

ro no_console_suspend cryptomgr.notests loglevel=3  ro no_console_suspend 
pci=pcie_bus_perf nvme_core.default_ps_max_latency_us=0 console=tty1 
fbcon=rotate:3 fbcon=font:TER16x32 cma=256MB console=ttymxc1  
console=tty1

The text on boot was fine until the kernel switched from the frame buffer to the virtual console (tty1). Then, for whatever reason, console-setup was setting FONTSIZE=“8x16”. Which, for me at least, was not very readable. I can test setting FONTSIZE= in console-setup and see if that works as well. I’ll let you know. I’m mostly playing around with this device on the weekends.

I probably won’t continue down the greeter path fix, but hopefully this post attracts the attention of anyone willing to give it a try. Cage + gtkgreet was 90% of the way there. To be fair to tuigreet, it does look pretty rad and minimalistic.

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