If you have a tiny monitor like the 7-inch that sits on top of my home server, or a high(er) DPI display like the one I just installed in my used Thinkpad X250 (going from 1366x768 to 1920x1080 in 12 inches of screen real estate), you may have wondered how to increase the font size for your hardware console (the physical display attached to the computer) in the absence of a graphical environment like gnome.
There's a two part recipe for this:
- Install fonts-terminus (the name of the package in Ubuntu).
- Reconfigure the console to use a larger Terminus font.
On Ubuntu the reconfiguration is done with sudo dpkg-reconfigure console-setup. Once in the curses-based menu, select:
UTF-8 > Guess optimal character set > TerminusBold > 12x24 (framebuffer only)
The exact font size to use is up to you: what I selected above was readable enough without crowding the display too much (text does get cut off at the bottom of the sub $100 7-inch, and I've yet to find a way to adjust that). I eventually went with just 12x24 for both the server and laptop displays. "TerminusBold" made the characters on the 7-inch display a bit brighter and easier to read.
Note that you should be able to see the result in the hardware console immediately.
Arturo Borrero. "Debian and the adventure of screen resolution". ral-arturo, 30 January 2023, https://ral-arturo.org/2023/01/30/console.html.