Reading the handbook from console

[Warren Block]

On Sun, 13 Jan 2013, Polytropon wrote:

> On Sun, 13 Jan 2013 15:15:23 -0500, Fbsd8 wrote:
>> What do you mean by "enable console graphics"?
>> Is this something different than x11?
>
> The is a famous library, svgalib, a "low level console graphics
> library" which can - under _very_ specific circumstances - display
> graphics "on" the text mode console. There are few browsers,
> image viewers and even media players that can use this interface
> to display "console graphics" while _not_ needing X.
>
> However, this only works for local displays. As soon as there
> is a serial or SSH connection involved, it doesn't work anymore.
>
> I've actually never seen this working on FreeBSD; maybe it's
> just a Linuxism. Maybe it's just because I've never tried. :-)

I tried it years ago.  It was more trouble than it was worth.  640x400 
(AFAIR), with eight glorious VGA colors, chosen by IBM for their 
ugliness.  Also, it was prone to crashing the machine.

There is a plain ASCII version of the Handbook along with the other 
formats at 
ftp://ftp.freebsd.org/pub/FreeBSD/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/handbook/