What is the default Debian/Ubuntu console (TTY) font called?
- Ubuntu Mono from the Ubuntu Font Family (font.ubuntu.com) is the default GUI monospace terminal font on Ubuntu 11.10.
- Terminus Font (terminus-font.sourceforge.net) is the default font on the Linux console (Ctrl+Alt+F1,
$ /bin/setfont /usr/share/consolefonts/FOO.psf.gz) - GNU Unifont (unifoundry.com) is the default font for the CD bootloader menu, Grub bootloader, and alternate (text-based) installer where a software framebuffer is in use. (Unifont is full-coverage fall-back font).
Technical details
The GUI font is set, for Ubuntu, in the ubuntu-artwork package by a default setting in /usr/share/glib-2.0/schemas/ubuntu-artwork.gschema.override. The change was made in Bug #865013 on
2011-10-04 for Ubuntu 11.10. It's possible to query the value of this setting (the user may have overridden or changed it) with:
$ gsettings get org.gnome.desktop.interface monospace-font-name
'Ubuntu Mono 13'
The configuration of the Linux Terminal consoles fonts is slightly more involved; there are a limited number of slots available for characters on the framebuffer, so the best subset is selected at package install time by the code in /var/lib/dpkg/info/console-setup.config with the result stored in /etc/default/console-setup.
As @Chen Xiao-Long notes, the console font subsets are built-up from a myriad of bitmap fonts sourced from different places; these are fully documented in /usr/share/doc/console-setup/copyright.fonts.gz. When the hinting-work in Ubuntu Mono reaches a high-enough level, then hopefully it will be possible to bitmaps exported from Ubuntu Mono instead, see Bug #724022, at least for the areas where we have coverage.
That's what I found in another post:
"Ubuntu Monospace comes preinstalled with Ubuntu 11.10 and it is the default terminal font."
Well, I've just figured out the correct answer for Xubuntu 14.04 in TTY (text-only mode, no X), it's this one: /usr/share/consolefonts/Uni2-Fixed16.psf.gz
I've compared the default console (CTRL-ALT-F1) with modified console (CTRL-ALT-F2), where I walked through:
for i in /usr/share/consolefonts/Uni*; do setfont "$i"; ls -l /proc/; echo -e "\nINFO: currently set font: $i"; sleep 2; clear; done
(I'd been interested in unicode fonts only)