A larger font size and changing the default terminal on an Eeepc

The Eeepc Ultraportable laptops are small, light and many of them run Linux. All that is good. I use the Asus-provided default Xandros Linux OS on mine and am very happy with it. The small size means a small screen though, and the default x-terminal-emulator (xterm) looks small inside that small screen. I found spending any amount of time using the command line made me end up squinting.

You can press ‘Control’ and right-click the mouse inside the xterm window to select a larger font size. The window expands to compensate for the increased font size. The window doesn’t fit the screen very well any more if you choose ‘large’ font sizes or above. Also this change will be lost if you close and reopen the terminal.

The default Xandros OS is based on Debian. It comes with a handy program for ‘Debian’s alternatives system’ that uses symbolic linking to allow administrators to choose a particular program to be used as the default one if several other programs do the same job and carry the same generic name. It is called ‘update-alternatives’ and I learned how to use it to change the default terminal here. Now when I press the ‘Control, Alt and T’ key combination to launch a terminal Konsole opens instead of Xterm. Konsole is included in the default Xandros OS on the Eee. Here’s the command:

sudo update-alternatives --config x-terminal-emulator

Select Konsole from the displayed list of programs that carry the generic name ‘x-terminal-emulator’.

Konsole fits the screen much better. It is also easy to select colour schemes and larger font sizes. The chosen colour schemes and font changes are retained between sessions if you click ‘Save as Default’ in the settings tab. All round a good improvement.