Daemon Dancing in the Dark

Setting keyboard & font

One thing I've been trying to get "just so" has been my terminal setup. I don't use X, as my FreeBSD machine is basically a server, and I'm perfectly comfortable using Emacs and a command line. But I've been trying to get the font, video screen and keyboard mapping to work for me, and I still don't have it 100% my way.

I currently have the following in my rc.conf:

#
# vidcontrol stuff
#
font8x8="swiss-8x8"
font8x16="swiss-8x16"
allscreens_flags="80x60 lightwhite blue"

This sets my fonts to be the 'swiss' fonts, and screen to be in 80x60 mode, bright white on blue screen. Mind you, this is for all the virtual terminals (the ones you get to via Alt-F keys), and doesn't work in the X Terminals. I haven't been able to get the 132 column modes to work correctly yet.

Anyway, the following man page documents vidfont and kbdmap, two commands you can run interactively from the command line to let you select which video font and keyboard mapping to use. I haven't yet found a keyboard mapping that works right for me, so I'm still playing with this one too.

FreeBSD Hypertext Man Pages: kbdmpa, vidfont

You also should set the correct variables in /etc/rc.conf so the changes stick. See /etc/defaults/rc.conf for all the "System console options". That is what you do with the strings hat vidfont and kbdmap echo back for you, put them right into your rc.conf.

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Posted by jdarnold at 09:04 AM | TrackBack