setterm

[Rob Landley]

On Friday 09 September 2005 14:56, Lord Sidiuz wrote:
> > original setterm does more than this.
>
> yes I now, but I only want color and don't know much about how to do the
> rest of the things setterm does

Understood.  We have plenty of busybox applets that do only the subset of 
functions people have shown interest in. :)

I just tried setterm on Konsole yet again and it had no effect, but 
CTRL-ALT-F2 login and try it, and it worked.

Huh.

The environment variable "LS_COLORS" is very big.

> > (And not just redoing terminal screen blanking,
>
> ??? stop talking in _insert_a_languaje_I_cant speak_here_
>  I only now spanish and a little english.

English: where any verb can be nouned and any noun is subject to verbing.

I have that on a button (badge) somewhere...

> > which is also just another funky escape sequence
> > sent to the kernel, but resetting the default color so
> > that when you esc[0m you get the new default color
> > back...)
>
> where can I get more info about that ?? so I can improbre a little this
> setterm, note, gnu setterm code uses terminfo and the few comments explain
> very little, i.e. not good documentation, not gonna use terminfo, so can't
> understand and the code of gnu/setterm is plain ugly can't follow it.

man 4 console_codes

> > Strangely, that only seems to work on linux kernel
> >
>  >controlled text termals and
> >
> > not on konsole, so probably it's not important...
> >
> > Rob
>
> the underline option included in my setterm only works in emulated
> terminals ( xterm, xkonsole... ) did you noticed that I wander why, is only
> another escape sequence...

No, because underline was a characteristic of the old mono graphics cards 
(circa 1982), and was never implemented on vga hardware.  So modern text mode 
hardware emulating the old VGA text mode can't do underline.

Interesting historical trivia: color text mode memory was at a different 
memory address (b800:0000 I think) than mono text mode memory (b000:0000), so 
if you put both a mono card and a vga card in the same system, they wouldn't 
conflict.  The first dual headed displays were text only, with people putting 
a mono card and a vga card in two different ISA bus slots over 20 years 
ago...

Not that I ever did this.  (I didn't have a mono card and a second monitor...)

Rob