uConsole - R-01 and RISC-V thread

uConsole
, ,
21

A few quality of life items for true tty0 life.

Background: I took the full true ‘uConsole’ route where echo $TERM returns linux. No framebuffer, no TWM, no window manager. ( Well tmux but, a post on that later )

Truly drop any window manager and GUI

Per the excellent readme guidance:

  • I mv vs rm the cpi users .bash_profile
  • Dropped autologin ability by mv of the /etc/systemd/system/getty@tty1.service.d/ folder to a out of the way place /home/cpi/original/
  • enabled ssh
  • Took the liberty of adding my own user with ssh-keys and a password for actual interactive keyboard login

That said, I was having all sorts of issues seeing the text and the cursor was missing.

Overall here are a few quality of life tweaks that I applied and your experience may vary:

My eyes are not what they used to be!

I love the resolution and look of this display it is top notch. Yet my glasses or contacts just don’t correct my vision to experience the bash shell in its full glory on this excellent display. “computer zoom in, enhance”

vim /etc/default/console-setup

# CONFIGURATION FILE FOR SETUPCON

# Consult the console-setup(5) manual page.

ACTIVE_CONSOLES="/dev/tty[1-6]"

CHARMAP="UTF-8"

CODESET="Lat15"
FONTFACE="Fixed"
FONTSIZE="12x24"         ### <-- Magical setting for my eyes!

VIDEOMODE=

# The following is an example how to use a braille font
# FONT='lat9w-08.psf.gz brl-8x8.psf'

.bashrc add a prompt shape and color

echo `PROMPT_COMMAND='echo -e "\e[?16;0;16c"'` >> .bashrc

This will create a nice happy cyan block cursor with no blinks

Vim where is your cursor

create a .vimrc with the following

if &term =~ "linux"
  let &t_ve= "\e[?25h"
  let &t_vi= "\e[?25l"
  let &t_SI= "\e[?0c"
  let &t_EI= "\e[?16;143;255c"
endif

if &term =~ "xterm\\|rxvt"
  " use an orange cursor in insert mode
  let &t_SI = "\<Esc>]12;orange\x7"
  " use a red cursor otherwise
  let &t_EI = "\<Esc>]12;red\x7"
  silent !echo -ne "\033]12;red\007"
  " reset cursor when vim exits
  autocmd VimLeave * silent !echo -ne "\033]112\007"
  " use \003]12;gray\007 for gnome-terminal and rxvt up to version 9.21
endif

This does two things

  1. If you are using vim over SSH it will see your xterm or rxvt term and apply an nifty color scheme
  2. if you are on the local console you will have a nice visible cursor

OK I lied, I did try a window manager xfce4

There are myths on the internet that xfce4 can’t run in framebuffer only mode. Well that myth is solved in that xfce4 looks fantastic ( not speedy on a RISC-V with 1G RAM have you ) but, it ‘does’ work!!! :smiley:

startxfce4
2 Likes