Found this as a result of searching the NetBSD mail archives.

When I had an Arch Linux VirtualBox install on my work’s laptop I used to occasionally use that in framebuffer only mode, mostly as a novelty, but sometimes when we were running really low on bandwidth at home and so “forcing” myself to use something as low as bandwidth as possible. Not that I use much anyway: on my ye-olde NetBSD laptop I’ve no choice but to run things quite minimally using dwm and then pretty much just st to ssh into Linode; only occasionally taking advantage of this setup to run Surf or Dillo or look at images on Twitter, but most of the time I’m simply ssh’d into Linode and so it seemed silly to be running X, dwm and st just for that.

I found out that it was really easy to change the “resolution” of the framebuffer for NetBSD wscons, but it was not pretty when ssh’d in. As far as I could tell there isn’t anyway to make wscons behave nicely with unicode; it seems that at some point there was something called uwscons being developed, but I don’t think it’s available any more.

mlterm-fb, however, is great. It was easy to set-up. And as far as customisation goes all I have are Solarized dark colours:

# ~/.mlterm/color
# Solarized dark colours
black=#073642
red=#dc322f
green=#859900
yellow=#b58900
blue=#268bd2
magenta=#d33682
cyan=#2aa198
white=#eee8d5
hl_black=#002b36
hl_red=#cb4b16
hl_green=#586e75
hl_yellow=#657b83
hl_blue=#839496
hl_magenta=#6c71c4
hl_cyan=#93a1a1
hl_white=#fdf6e3

and this to get the foreground and background the right way round with Solarized: (Note: My choice of colours for ‘fg_color’ and ‘bg_color’ might not be exactly right for Solarized yet, but it is working well enough for me at the moment; by default mlterm-fb has them reversed which wasn’t good at all).

# ~/.mlterm/main
# To work with Solarized dark
fg_color = white
bg_color = black

and efont-unicode (as recommended in the setup):

# ~/.mlterm/font-fb
DEFAULT = /usr/pkg/share/fonts/X11/efont/b14.pcf.gz

It’s so much harder for me to waste time now. I should probably find someway of blocking myself from feeds; curse Snownews for still working so well.

Important note to self: if my ssh session hangs, I can no longer just close the terminal. I now need to remember CTRL+~+. (Which is CTRL+SHIFT+~ followed by . on this keyboard; Also CTRL+SHIFT+~ followed by CTRL+Z to suspend; I love Unix).

[EDIT: 2015-04-07] I’ve got my ssh shortcuts wrong above. I don’t know where I got the requiremnent for CTRL from, but actually you need ENTER followed by ~ followed by ., etc.