Tiny little fonts in UM opening page

My new laptop (already more than one year old) came with incredibly small fonts in the launching page (the green screen with login & password). I was travelling and in great need for a laptop, so no question of sending it back to seller and when I tried Dell said it was a Linux thing which I could repair myself through Linux.
I had one more try today. Uploaded Plymouth, but that changed only appearance, so I uninstalled it to go back to the old green initial page of UM.
I must have deleted something I should not, for now, on lauching UM, I get this screen:

What can I do to go back to the old green UM screen?

We need to know what we are working with, so can you provide the report from

inxi -ACDMNSG

Next, can you provide a listing of the contents of your

/etc/default/grub

When you booted, did you get the Grub menu, or did it go directly to that login screen? If no menu, then edit the above grub file to show

GRUB_TIMEOUT_STYLE="menu"

Also, if you understand the "boot processes" enough, you might want to consider removing "quiet" flag from the "GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT" parameter, and see if you can spot anything that is displayed during the boot process.

Lastly, do you recall which "major" (or minor) actions you performed before the unwanted behaviour started showing up? With those, the experienced Members of the Community will have something concrete to assess and provide feedback or probe further.

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I'd suggest you first try to execute startx command to launch your GUI desktop environment manually.

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It is not clear what you have done, because plymouth is preinstalled.

That was a mistake, because plymouth, lightdm and arctica-greeter packages were most likely removed all together.

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I am afraid you are right. Quite fed up with trying to sort out what happened znd will erase and reinstall Ubuntu Mate today.
Thanks for your support.

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I reinstalled UMate, which seems to be working as before. But I still the problem of the tiny little fonts in the computer's opening screen. Would anyone know of a way to increase these fonts?
To some extent this is not a big problem, as one can adjust font size in Appearance/Fonts/Application Fonts etc. There are however internet pages that open with these fixed small fonts - like the App Center, for instance - that are quite difficult, almost impossible to read.
Any help will be most appreciated.

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That sounds like a browser preference issue, not an OS preference issue.

For your browser, try to locate the section for fonts, then tell your browser to "override" font selection for sites. Otherwise, the site's choice of fonts (however crazy small that might be) would override you personal desktop's setting for preferred font.

The two are not automatically linked/synchronized, unless you force it to be.

(EDIT: image added)

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I am struggling with small fonts too.
First, I increase font sizes in Appearance preferences just like you've described.
Second I change DPI (aka scaling) in Display preferences.
Finally, I increase font size per application basis, i.e. for terminal, text editor, etc. In my Firefox preferences I set minimal font size and disallow web pages to ignore/override these settings.

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Eric,
I gave up and reinstalled UM, which works very fine. I am however struggling with the tiny small little fonts in the laptop's opening/launching page.
I would very much appreciate any suggestion to correct this issue.

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Thanks UGNVS.
I gave up part of my struggle and reinstalled UM clean. No other problem but the small fonts as described. I will follow your advice and see what happens. I don't think one can go wrong there.
Thanks again for your help - and do let me know if you come across other solutions.

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OK. You could be referring to two things:

  • Console font, or
  • GRUB font.


If you are referring to the first, which displays all the boot-time system messages for "verbose" mode, then look at:

For myself, my /etc/default/console-setup is as follows, where you see that I changed the font specification and size (I actually made mine smaller):

# CONFIGURATION FILE FOR SETUPCON

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

###	Interractive setup can be accomplished with the following:  dpkg-reconfigure -plow console-setup

###	Use 'showconsolefont' to show console font

#VERBOSE_OUTPUT="yes"
VERBOSE_OUTPUT="no"

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

CHARMAP="UTF-8"

CODESET="guess"

FONTFACE="Fixed"
FONTSIZE="8x16"

#FONTSIZE="20x10"
#FONTFACE="Terminus"
#SCREEN_WIDTH=140
#SCREEN_HEIGHT=45

VIDEOMODE=

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

For the above, it is critical that you have the font files in place before attempting to boot with the references pointing to those.



For the second, GRUB level, here are a couple of things to look at:

https://www.baeldung.com/linux/grub-menu-font-size


Hope those help!

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How small are your fonts? Try attaching a screenshot of the application, which is 'almost impossible to read'.
What is the physical size and resolution of your screen?

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If you can't take a snapshot, take a photo and share that (edited) photo. :slight_smile:

Eric,

Thanks. I'll try and do what you suggest. Hoping that this will not mean another disaster for me and I will have once again to delete and reinstall UMate...

I'll send you tomorrow the snapshot you asked;

ironfoot,

Sorry, I thought I had already send you the screenshot. Will send tomorrow.