Saturday, June 6, 2009

Change Resolution of Red Hat Enterprise Linux Text Console

If Red Hat Enterprise Linux is installed without GUI (Gnome, KDE), or the system is running at runlevel 3, all the text appears big (low resolution) on local text-mode console as following,



Actually, this can be changed by adding 'vga=<resolution code>' option into grub boot loader configuration file '/boot/grub/grub.conf'.

Original grub.conf contains following line,

kernel /vmlinuz-2.6.9-89.EL ro root=LABEL=/ rhgb quiet


And we are going to set the resolution to 1024x768 24bit color and new file is changed as following,

kernel /vmlinuz-2.6.9-89.EL ro root=LABEL=/ rhgb quiet vga=792


Note: Resolution code (here is 792) really depends on hardware. It could be following values (come from Red Hat support),

   Depth      800×600     1024×768     1152×864     1280×1024     1600×1200
   8 bit         vga=771     vga=773        vga=353        vga=775         vga=796
   16 bit       vga=788     vga=791        vga=355        vga=794         vga=798
   24 bit       vga=789     vga=792        -------           vga=795         vga=799


After reboot, much more messages come up onto text console, the console becomes 'bigger',


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