How to fix your ubuntu 9.10 console

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After upgrading my server (that isn’t running X) to Ubuntu 9.10 (Karmic Koala), I found that the console on my LCD monitor was cropping out several characters from the left and right sides. It wasn’t hard to fix, though, given the magick incantations:

If you upgraded to Karmic

You’ll have grub 1 (legacy). To fix it, follow this thread, and edit /boot/grub/menu.lst. Look for the line that starts with “defoptions” — uncomment the line and add “vga=791″ (or 789 for lower resolution):

## additional options to use with the default boot option, but not with the
## alternatives
## e.g. defoptions=vga=791 resume=/dev/hda5
# defoptions=quiet splash
defoptions=vga=791

Save the file and then reboot.

If you installed Karmic directly

You’ll be running grub 2, which requires these instructions. I’ve reformatted them here for posterity:

Step one: In /etc/default/grub, add this line: 

set gfxmode=1024x768

Step two: In /etc/grub.d/00_header, add the highlighted line:
[bash highlight="3"]
if loadfont `make_system_path_relative_to_its_root ${GRUB_FONT_PATH}` ; then
set gfxmode=${GRUB_GFXMODE}
set gfxpayload=keep
insmod gfxterm
[/bash]

Step three: Run update-grub, and reboot.

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