LINUX: change number of lines/columns that are displayed in a terminal (without X)

"Assuming you want to change the resolution of the display (which indirectly changes how many characters fit in each row/column), you can change the mode.

The mode of the graphics card can be set via the vga boot parameter (assuming you don't use framebuffer), but the value to set it to depends on your graphics card.

To see what values are available add vga=ask which will give you a list to choose and test from. If you use grub just append that to the kernel line of /boot/grub/menu.lst for your kernel. Once you have decided what mode you want, replace ask with that code.

For some documentation see e.g. Documentation/svga.txt in the kernel source tree."