[gentoo-user] console size/display anomaly

[John Blinka]

Hi, everyone,

One of my gentoo boxes is mostly used headless, but now and then I connect
it to a display - a nearby large screen tv.  When I use the tv as a
console, the tv screen does not display the first few lines of text that
would normally appear, nor the last few, nor the leftmost few characters of
text, nor (if I type a really long line), the last few.  It’s like a
picture framed with a mat that cuts off the image uniformly on all sides:
top, bottom, left, right.

It does this with any gentoo box that I connect to it, but not when the
same box is running Windows.

It also does this when I run  X11.  If I make the mistake of maximizing a
window, then all the tools around the periphery of the window that normally
would allow me to resize the window are offscreen, making life with that
window difficult.

Everything else about the display is completely normal.

Clearly the tv and gentoo box are communicating something about the size of
the screen, but somehow misunderstanding each other.  Windows and the tv
don’t misunderstand each other.

There must be some place where I can intervene to correct this behavior.
But I have no idea where that place is, or what to Google for help.

Any ideas?

Thanks for your help!

John Blinka