Weird characters in the linux consoles and lines not drawn correctly

[sktsee]

On Wed, 06 Jun 2007 12:44:09 -0300, Felipe Figueiredo wrote:

> On 6/6/07, sktsee <sktsee at tulsaconnect.com> wrote:
>> On Wed, 06 Jun 2007 07:18:36 -0700, Chris Lemire wrote:
>>
>> > Hello. I need some help with a problem in Feisty. When I launch
>> > midnight commander from a linux console such as tty5, it displays
>> > strange characters that it should not be displaying and does not
>> > display the lines correctly. How can it be fixed? I have tried
>> > changing the locale from en_US.UTF-8 to en_US.ISO-8859-1, but that
>> > did not make a difference.
>> >
>> > http://img183.imageshack.us/img183/9026/hpim1001bh8.jpg
>>
>>
>> Try "sudo /etc/init.d/console-setup reload" and see if that corrects
>> the problem.
>>
>>
> Gee, this has long bothered me, thanks for this solution!
> 
> However, how would a non-sudo user solve this? I just tested and this
> fix appears to be necessary everytime I switch from X to console. This
> happens to me, since Edgy, maybe even since Dapper. Is there a
> permantent fix?
> 
> regards
> FF

I found two other ways of resetting the console to use the correct font.

The first way is to use the setupcon command: (must be issued in vt)

$ setupcon -f -v


The second way is to use the consolechars command: (also must be issued in
vt)

$ consolechars -f /usr/share/consolefonts/<filename of console font>


Though it's not really a permanent fix as to what causes the console font
to switch away from what's specified in /etc/default/console-setup, you can
put the consolechars command in your ~/.profile and have it reset the font
when you login.

For example, here's a snippet of my .profile

--------
# the default umask is set in /etc/profile #umask 022

# switch back to preferred console font
consolechars -f /usr/share/consolefonts/Lat15-Terminus16.psf.gz

# if running bash
if [ -n "$BASH_VERSION" ]; then
----

Note that my font is probably not going to be what you have configured if
you have stuck with the default Ubuntu installed font. If you issue the
"setupcon -f -v" command, it'll tell you what font file is being loaded,
and then you can use that filename with the consolechars command. If you
want to change fonts, I would recommend using "dpkg-reconfigure
console-setup".

-- 
sktsee