[BRLTTY] Using a Raspberry pi 2 as a SSH client

[Lars Bjørndal]

Thank you, Mario!

At the bottom of this message, I'll point out what I ended up doing.

On Tue, Dec 29, 2015 at 03:22:18PM +0100, Mario Lang wrote:
> Lars Bjørndal <lars at lamasti.net> writes:
> 
> > Hi, Mario!
> >
> > Thanks a lot for your description. You wrote:
> >
> >> Lars Bjørndal <lars at lamasti.net> writes:
> >> 
> >> > Hello, list!
> >> >
> >> > On Sat, Oct 17, 2015 at 08:50:03PM +0200, Lars Bjørndal wrote:
> >> >> I became tired of not having a usable SSH client on my Android phone. So
> >> >> I bought a Raspberry Pi 2, a mobile charging battery bank and a bluetooth
> >> >> and a wireless USB dongle. I installd Fedora 22 ARM and BRLTTY on it.
> >> >> This works pretty well.
> >> >> 
> >> >> I have two issues, that I hope someone on this list may have solutions
> >> >> to:
> >> >
> >> > [...]
> >> >
> >> >> - Another issue is that I can't manage to change the lines per screen
> >> >>   and characters per line. Now, it's set to 28x74. 'stty cols 80 rows 25'
> >> >>   outputs invalid argument for standard input, or something similar.
> >> >
> >> > After fiddling a bit more, I found that 'stty rows 25' is working. But
> >> > trying to set the line length to 80, e.g. greater than 74, isn't
> >> > possible. Do anyone know of a solution to this?
> >> 
> >> You are likely using a framebuffer driver as backend for your console.
> >
> > Yes, I realized that. I tried to remove it by putting "nomodeset
> > vga=normal" into the /boot/cmdline.txt, but the framebuffer was still
> > active after rebooting, even though the portion was part of the
> > /proc/cmdline output.
> 
> As Jason has already pointed out, it is very likely that your ARM system
> does not feature any legacy VGA.  So fb is likely your only option.
> 
> >> In these situations, two things become relevant when aiming for a
> >> certain columns/lines length: The actual screen resolution in use, and
> >> the size of the console font currently loaded.
> >> fbset should tell you your current screen resolution:
> >> 
> >> root at fx:~# fbset
> >> 
> >> mode "1024x768"
> >>     geometry 1024 768 1024 768 32
> >>     timings 0 0 0 0 0 0 0
> >>     accel true
> >>     rgba 8/16,8/8,8/0,0/0
> >> endmode
> >
> > I got:
> >
> > "mode "592x448"
> >     geometry 592 448 592 448 16
> >     timings 0 0 0 0 0 0 0
> >     rgba 5/11,6/5,5/0,0/16
> > endmode"
> 
> Yes, and 592/8 is 74, which is what you are seeing AFAIR.
> Try to up your horizontal screen resolution.
> If you can get it up to 640, you should be happy.
> 
> I used to use 1280 with a 14 pixel wide font.
> Gives you 91 chars per line.  And with a bit of stty magic, you get
> exactly 88, which is very nice for a Modular Evolution user :-)

As I have a 40 character display connected, I put the command 'fbset
-yres 400 -xres 640' in /etc/rc.d/rc.local. However, then only the
root user got the right 80x25 terminal. So I subscribed my regular
user to the video group and put the command above also in .bashrc for
that user. It
works and I'm happy.

Thanks and regards,

Lars