Invariably, an Ubuntu upgrade only ever brings me pain in one area: the framebuffer. Granted, most Ubuntu users probably don’t care about the resolution of their framebuffer because they probably rarely venture there.

For me, however, having the correct resolution and a decent font is important. Not because I spend a huge amount of time there (I don’t), but because in the past I have been forced to — and quickly learned that if the resolution is off, it makes it very difficult to work with.

So the recent, otherwise completely successful, upgrade to Maverick Meerkat once again left me with an almost useless console. Fortunately, the hack for forcing a 1680x1050 resolution worked¹, so it was just a matter of getting Terminus to stick as the default console font.

This was one instance where Google failed me. There doesn’t seem to be any authoritative guide to setting your console font permanently. I edited /etc/default/console-setup and added Terminus as the font, like so:

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CODESET="Lat15"
FONTFACE="Terminus"
FONTSIZE="16"

Issuing, from the console:

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sudo setupcon -v

would change the font to Terminus for that session but a reboot soon reverted it to the default fixed (which, given Ubuntu have been working on their fonts, is spectacularly ugly).

I finally asked in #ubuntu and was pointed in the right direction:

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sudo dpkg-reconfigure console-setup

And now I have a workable framebuffer.

Notes

1. Hack to force higher framebuffer resolution in /etc/default/grub

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GRUB_GFXPAYLOAD_LINUX=1680x1050