[Date Prev][Date Next][Thread Prev][Thread Next][Date Index][Thread Index]

Re: colors

On Tue, 28 Sep 1999, Leif Pedersen wrote:

> Is there a way to get the local console to properly support ANSI colors
> and hi-bit characters [for nifty line-drawing]?

You're a psychic, I just mailed an ex-pcvt hacker with some questions
about this a half hour ago.

The i386 console driver is called PCVT and emulates a vt220 terminal. It
was never built to support PC-style consoles, unfortunately. This is an
issue I'm currently looking into.

For example, you may have noticed that only 8 colors are available. This
is because PCVT steals one of the color/attribute bits to support 512
character sets instead of just 256.

So I can't give any conclusive answers right now, except that I will
continue to play with the PCVT driver for at least a little while longer.
:-)

  . 
 :  Aaron Campbell <aaron@cs.dal.ca> - [ http://www.biodome.org/~fx ]
  `-------------------------------------------------------------------