How to permanently change the console TTY font type so it holds after reboot

command lineconsolefontstty

I'm running Ubuntu 15.04 64-bit Desktop Edition (A Debian based Linux).

I used sudo dpkg-reconfigure console-setup from the command line to change the default console font type to Terminus. Immediately afterwards the console fonts changed to the sharper looking font face.

However, after a reboot Ctrl+Alt+F1 takes me to a console window that has the original chunkier looking style font face, not my selected choice.

The /etc/default/console-setup file appears to have been changed to my choices.

# CONFIGURATION FILE FOR SETUPCON

# Consult the console-setup(5) manual page.

ACTIVE_CONSOLES="/dev/tty[1-6]"

CHARMAP="UTF-8"

CODESET="guess"
FONTFACE="Terminus"
FONTSIZE="8x16"

VIDEOMODE=

# The following is an example how to use a braille font
# FONT='lat9w-08.psf.gz brl-8x8.psf'

How do I permanently change the console font to use my preferred font?

Best Answer

See https://askubuntu.com/questions/630118/ and https://askubuntu.com/questions/328463/.

This problem seems to be caused by a mismatch in the naming of fonts that console-setup expects vs what are in /usr/share/consolefonts/, and thus copied to /etc/console-setup/ when you pick a font to use (using dpkg-reconfigure console-setup).

If you go to a console and do an strace /lib/udev/console-setup-tty fbcon, you can see that it is trying to open fonts like this:

/etc/console-setup/Lat15-TerminusBold11x22.psf

But if you look in /etc/console-setup/, there are only a handful of fonts in there (the ones you picked), and they look more like this:

/etc/console-setup/Lat15-TerminusBold22x11.psf.gz

One has height x width, and the other has width x height.

The problem can be fixed in a few ways.

(1) /lib/udev/console-setup-tty could be fixed - This is the more permanent, upstream solution.

(2) You could manually change /etc/default/console-setup, reversing the height and width in FONTSIZE. This will need to be done each time you change the fonts using dpkg-reconfigure console-setup. But when the machine reboots, that preference is kept.

(3) You could install the fonts that console-setup-tty expects. This is what I call the "overkill" option. I did it like this:

In /etc/rc.local:

# install console fonts and then set up console
/etc/console-setup/fonts.sh install
/lib/udev/console-setup-tty fbcon

Create a script called /etc/console-setup/fonts.sh:

#!/bin/bash

action=$1

srcdir="/usr/share/consolefonts"
parent="/etc/console-setup"
subdir="fonts"

case "$1" in
    install)
        # console fonts are not named properly in Ubuntu 15.04, compensate
        [[ -d $parent/$subdir ]] || mkdir $parent/$subdir
        for x in $( cd $srcdir ; ls -1 ) ; do
           # rearrange the two numbers from HHxWW to WWxHH
           y=$(echo "$x" | sed -e 's/^\([^-]*\)-\([^0-9]*\)\([0-9]*\)x\([0-9]*\).psf.gz/\1-\2\4x\3.psf.gz/g')
           # whether the pattern above matches or not, we'll be uncompressing here
           z=${y/.psf.gz/.psf}
           [[ ! -f $parent/$subdir/$z ]] && zcat $srcdir/$x > $parent/$subdir/$z
           [[ ! -L $parent/$z ]] && ln -sv $subdir/$z $parent/$z
        done
        ;;
    uninstall)
        rm -rf $parent/$subdir
        # only remove broken links (links to the fonts we removed above)
        rm $(find -L $parent -type l)
        ;;
    *)
        echo "$(basename $0) install|uninstall"
        ;;
esac

exit 0

For a quick pragmatic solution, I'd do #2, with a comment in the file that it may be need to be re-done if you choose a different font (assuming the comment does not also get overwritten).

But #3 works well with minimal fuss or mess.

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