I used to use a real VT220 terminal way back in the college days, and I remembered that I rather liked the font. So I decided to make a linux console font to use it on the text console of linux hosts.
Place the font file in /usr/share/consolefonts
Edit /etc/default/console-setup
to have the lines:
CHARMAP="UTF-8" FONTFACE="VGA" FONTSIZE="8x16" FONT="vt220.psf.gz"
This gives the best effect when combined with changing to a blinking green block cursor.
There is a bug in the Ubuntu 20.x (and probably prior versions) script that sets the console fonts (/usr/bin/setupcon
). When you specify a FONT, for some reason, the script puts its name in twice, which breaks the script. It’s a simple enough fix. Find the line (line 690 as of when I am writing this):
FONTFILES=`echo $FONTFILES` # remove extra spaces
and change it to read:
FONTFILES=`echo $FONTFILES | tr ' ' '\n' | sort | uniq | tr '\n' ' '` # remove extra spaces
This will remove any duplicate file names, which will make it load correctly instead of erroring out and not setting it to the requested font.
Extra bonus: If you use a Raspberry Pi, and have one of the official screens for it, when you use this font, you get a perfect old school 80×24 terminal. Now if only the linux console supported all of the DEC primitives like double sized text and such…
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