I've installed FreeBSD inside a VM on a laptop. As it turns out, the laptop keyboard has no Scroll Lock key, which is used for scrolling the screen back in FreeBSD's console. How can I scroll back the output without Scroll Lock?
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2The question itself contained the answer I was looking for. My keyboard has Scroll Lock, but I didn't know I could use it! – mwfearnley Oct 27 '17 at 14:49
As root, dump the keyboard map to a file
kbdcontrol -d > mykeys
Change the file so "Ctrl+NumLock" will set "Scroll Lock". Find line with scancode "base" 069, or where "nlock" fills the entire line. Edit column 3 from "nlock" to "slock". The line now looks like:
"069 nlock nlock slock nlock nlock nlock nlock nlock O"
As root, issue the command:
kbdcontrol -l mykeys
The solution was found here.
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3For People using FreeBSD as a guest OS in a VirtualBox virtual machine on Mac OS X you can also remap Cntrl-Caps Lock. 058 clock clock slock clock clock clock clock clock O Typing Control-Caps Lock lets you scroll back on the console as far as the scrollback goes. Bliss! – Coroos Oct 8 '12 at 15:38
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3since this is a top result, I'll add that to make this change permanent (after reboot) follow the steps above, and then
mv mykeys /usr/share/syscons/keymaps/mykeys.kbd
then edit your rc.conf file and add a line withkeymap="mykeys"
– aron.duby Oct 6 '14 at 15:57 -
Laptop keyboards usually have a Fn key so that keys on a normal PC keyboard can be replicated. You should find that some combination of Fn and another key (hint: look for the blue text on your keys) will perform Scroll Lock. For instance, on my cheap netbook, Fn-F12 performs Scroll Lock.
I use tmux
for that, you can install it from ports under /usr/ports/sysutils/tmux
. Ctrl-b PgUp
and Ctrl-b PgDn
allow to scroll the console output in tmux
. BTW, tmux
has other great features, basically it is an advanced screen
replacement.
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WIll it allow to scroll back the output which was before starting tmux? Actually, I want to see all the boot messages, i.e. the output till login. – Eugene Yarmash Aug 23 '12 at 8:05
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2The boot message are stored in a file called dmesg.boot.
less /var/run/dmesg.boot
might help you. – Hennes Aug 23 '12 at 11:06 -
1@Hennes This file contains only part of the messages, up to mounting the root filesystem. I needed the rest. – Eugene Yarmash Aug 23 '12 at 12:58
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1@Hennes dmesg.boot does contain everything since the kernel was started. It does not contain the bootstrap loader messages or any BIOS messages that weren't cleared. – Chris S Oct 8 '12 at 15:49