After bootup the virtual console cursor is invisible?

temach · December 9, 2016

Fresh install no X server, no GUI.

Unfortunately the cursor is not shown in the terminal.

You can type and delete text, but the character under the cursor position is not at all highlighted.

I can make it shown with adding something like "echo -e '\e[?16;0;200c' " (colors it orange) to my bash prompt, but in then I start vim and the cursor is still hidden!

I can set colorcolumn and colorrow to work around this in vim, but it seems that the problem lies deeper.

So I looked around and found the setterm command. It works for setting my background and foreground colors, however when I do

"setterm --cursor on" or "setterm --blink on" nothing happens, cursor is still not shown.

So I looked around even more! And found that the virtual console can be configured in kernel boot options. The options are documented here: https://www.kernel.org/doc/Documentation/kernel-parameters.txt

And there is the option "vt.global_cursor_default= " which looks promising.

BUT! It looks like Armbian does not use grub. (no /etc/default/grub folder)

So the question is:

1) Is there any way to set kernel boot parameters?

OR

2) Is there any other way to solve this?

zador.blood.stained · December 9, 2016

This display driver was broken regarding cursor, it is fixed in latest beta kernel (you can install manually linux-image-sun8i... .deb from here) and it will be fixed in the next stable release (in ~1-2 months)