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Old 27th June 2008
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kienjakenobi kienjakenobi is offline
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Default Console Resolution Problem

According to several nice articles, including this one, and an article in the FreeBSD wiki, the first step to getting a high console resolution is to add these to lines to the kernel configuration file:

Code:
options      VESA
options      SC_PIXEL_MODE
After configuring my kernel to include those two options, I issue the make buildkernel command I this is the entire output that I see:

Code:
--------------------------------------------------------------
>>> Kernel build for BEDFORD started on Fri Jun 27 17:35:42 UTC 2008
--------------------------------------------------------------
===> BEDFORD
mkdir -p /usr/obj/usr/src/sys

--------------------------------------------------------------
>>> stage 1: configuring the kernel
--------------------------------------------------------------
cd /usr/src/sys/amd64/conf;  PATH=/usr/obj/usr/src/tmp/legacy/usr/sbin:/usr/obj/usr/src/tmp/legacy/usr/bin:/usr/obj/usr/src/tmp/legacy/usr/games:/usr/obj/usr/src/tmp/usr/sbin:/usr/obj/usr/src/tmp/usr/bin:/usr/obj/usr/src/tmp/usr/games:/sbin:/bin:/usr/sbin:/usr/bin  config  -d /usr/obj/usr/src/sys/BEDFORD  /usr/src/sys/amd64/conf/BEDFORD
/usr/src/sys/amd64/conf/BEDFORD: unknown option "VESA"
*** Error code 1

Stop in /usr/src.
*** Error code 1

Stop in /usr/src.
Some time ago I remember getting a high resolution console working using those guides, but I can not remember any fancy tricks to getting it to work.

I have tried it recently on 7.0-RELEASE and 8.0-CURRENT-200806 with this exact error.

In both cases I had the src/base and src/sys distributions installed. Do I need more src distributions than those two to be able to get VESA working?

Thanks
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Old 28th June 2008
jb_daefo jb_daefo is offline
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maybe if you use i386 rather than amd64 the
kernel would compile.
............
that is my vague recollection anyway. Some have said the only
reason to use amd64 rather than i386 is server-intensive
data processing. (another vague recollection)
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Old 28th June 2008
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I had the same problem some time ago, not sure what is going on since options VESA is still in NOTES.

Dynamically loading vesa works fine though (kldload vesa), so I just use that.
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Old 28th June 2008
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VESA is not supported on AMD64 because of some BIOS communication that the 64-Bit version can't do. I ran into this issue yesterday, when I tried to compile with the VESA option. The other option should work, but it's rather useless given that you can't use VESA modes. I was able to confirm this by looking at previous mailing list entries. It was hidden deep within one of the threads. I'm not sure if there is another way of changing console resolution, but at the moment, I'm stuck with only one mode as well.
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Old 28th June 2008
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I do remember that this stopped working for me, in 32 bit no less, quite awhle ago. I don't believe I got compile errors, but what had worked simply no longer worked. It reminded me of a Windows haiku.

Yesterday it worked
Today it is not working
Windows is like that.


But I digress.

Back on topic, that hasn't worked for me in probably over a year. As I usually wind up in X anyway, running several mlterms, (my x terminal of choice in FreeBSD) I never investigated it that thoroughly.
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Old 28th June 2008
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I just need xterm + screen + zsh. I'll have three or four xterm + screen sessions going in xfce, if I need them. I rarely drop into console, unless I have to. My .zshrc even autostarts Xfce upon console login, if it hasn't already been started.
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Old 28th June 2008
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Quote:
Originally Posted by kienjakenobi View Post
cd /usr/src/sys/amd64/conf; PATH=/usr/obj/usr/src/tmp/legacy/usr/sbin:/usr/obj/usr/src/tmp/legacy/usr/bin:/usr/obj/usr/src/tmp/legacy/usr/games:/usr/obj/usr/src/tmp/usr/sbin:/usr/obj/usr/src/tmp/usr/bin:/usr/obj/usr/src/tmp/usr/games:/sbin:/bin:/usr/sbin:/usr/bin config -d /usr/obj/usr/src/sys/BEDFORD /usr/src/sys/amd64/conf/BEDFORD
/usr/src/sys/amd64/conf/BEDFORD: unknown option "VESA"
Error is self explanatory, option VESA is not available on amd64, next time, look in /sys/conf/NOTES and /sys/amd64/conf/NOTES for amd64 FreeBSD custom kernel.

Just for other folks, option VESA is working perfectly on i386.

SC_PIXEL_MODE may still be usefull also look VESA800x600 in syscons(4)

Anyway, all this console stuff are going to be rewritten some time in future.(they are not MPSAFE)
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Old 28th June 2008
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Thanks very much everyone.

This makes perfect sense now. The system I got a high resolution console working on the 7.0 prerelease was i386. I just recently switched to amd64, so that makes it obvious why it is not working now.
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Old 28th June 2008
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High resolution consoles are overrated, (coming from a OpenBSD user..)
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Old 29th June 2008
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Yeah, there is not really much use for it except for the times when I am confined to a console and I need to read a message that is longer than can be displayed on my screen at one time.

In this case, of course, I can just log the output of the command into a file and then open it in an editor, but that can be an awful lot to do for some simple console read-outs sometimes.

He he. How very lazy.
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Old 29th June 2008
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I just think it looks nice
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Old 29th June 2008
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Quote:
Originally Posted by kienjakenobi View Post
Yeah, there is not really much use for it except for the times when I am confined to a console and I need to read a message that is longer than can be displayed on my screen at one time.

In this case, of course, I can just log the output of the command into a file and then open it in an editor, but that can be an awful lot to do for some simple console read-outs sometimes.

He he. How very lazy.
Perhaps it's time to read the more(1) and less(1) man pages.

i.e:
% dmesg | less
Now you know..
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Old 29th June 2008
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You can also press the Scroll Lock key and use the arrow keys and Page up/Down to scroll...
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Old 29th June 2008
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Carpetsmoker View Post
You can also press the Scroll Lock key and use the arrow keys and Page up/Down to scroll...
On FreeBSD, yes, but such a key didn't exist on early DEC terminals.

It's also not supported by OpenBSD either..
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Old 29th June 2008
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ehm ... Yes ... But this is about FreeBSD ... So why do you keep talking about OpenBSD ...?
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Old 29th June 2008
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It's bad to develop tendencies that are OS specific, the recommendation of more or less is a "generic" answer.

I'll go now..
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Old 30th June 2008
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Note: more *is* less on FreeBSD. They are hardlinks to the same binary. The only difference is that more has -X enabled while less doesn't (and a few other niggles, but that's the main one).

This trips me up all the time switching between FreeBSD and Linux, as more on Debian is the ancient, craptastic, real more that does very very very little. And using "less -X" all the time is a pain. And aliasing more to 'less -X' causes more problems when you switch to root or connect to a system where you forget to put the alias.
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Old 1st July 2008
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Note: FreeBSD syscons framebuffer, including high resolutions are ported from DragonFlyBSD.
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Old 12th September 2008
drayon drayon is offline
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Quote:
Originally Posted by richardpl View Post
Note: FreeBSD syscons framebuffer, including high resolutions are ported from DragonFlyBSD.
Really? Since when? Can you provide a link to this project work?

Thanks
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Old 12th September 2008
richardpl richardpl is offline
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http://www.freebsd.org/cgi/cvsweb.cg...cons/syscons.c search for revision 1.436
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