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jwodder

Member

Registered: 2026-05-14

Posts: 14

[SOLVED] Error setting virtual console cursor style via vt.cur_default

Following this wiki page and various other guides online, I am trying to permanently set the cursor style for the virtual console to a solid block by adding the following line to /etc/sysctl.d/99-local.conf:

vt.cur_default = 6

However, when I reboot, the cursor is still an underline, and the output from `journalctl -b` contains:

Jun 08 17:56:30 garnet systemd-sysctl[207]: Couldn't write '6' to 'vt/cur_default', ignoring: No such file or directory

Setting the cursor style with `printf '\e[?6c'` works fine, but of course it's not persistent.

And just to prove the sysctl config file is properly formatted, here is the output from `hexdump -C /etc/sysctl.d/99-local.conf`:

00000000  6b 65 72 6e 65 6c 2e 70  72 69 6e 74 6b 20 3d 20  |kernel.printk = |
00000010  33 20 34 20 31 20 33 0a  76 74 2e 63 75 72 5f 64  |3 4 1 3.vt.cur_d|
00000020  65 66 61 75 6c 74 20 3d  20 36 0a                 |efault = 6.|
0000002b

Last edited by jwodder (2026-06-08 22:39:44)

jwodder

Member

Registered: 2026-05-14

Posts: 14

Re: [SOLVED] Error setting virtual console cursor style via vt.cur_default

Further research suggests that parameters for the `vt` module cannot be set via sysctl for whatever reason, so I managed to get this working by instead adding "vt.cur_default=6" to GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT in my GRUB configuration, running `sudo grub-mkconfig -o /boot/grub/grub.cfg`, and rebooting.