Even though I do most of the work I do on my workstation in a graphical desktop environment, I sometimes want or need to switch to one of the virtual terminals (consoles), for example when trying to fix a connection problem or hanging desktop environment.
Whenever I had to do this I was always bothered by the fact that the font was so large (or, the other way around, the resolution so low). What made my annoyance worse was that I knew from my early Linux days So, instead of being annoyed I decided to fix this. Thanks to the help of mchid on unix.stackexchange.com I solved in a matter of minutes. The tricky part for me was to realise I am using an nVidia graphics card, which means things are just a little bit different than normally.
Just in case StackExchange ever goes down or this answer gets lost I will reproduce it below.
For newer Debian & Ubuntu distros using nvidia, I had to do the following: First, edit /etc/default/grub. Change the following line:
#GRUB_GFXMODE=640x480
to this:
GRUB_GFXMODE=1920x1200 GRUB_GFXPAYLOAD_LINUX=keep
replacing 1280×800 with the desired resolution.
Then:
echo "echo FRAMEBUFFER=y" | sudo tee /etc/initramfs-tools/conf.d/splash sudo update-initramfs -u sudo update-grub
To simply change the font size, you can do so using the following command:
sudo dpkg-reconfigure console-setup