Fedora Is Unsure About 256 Color Terminals

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Fedora Is Unsure About 256 Color Terminals

While Fedora releases tend to be ambitions on new Linux features and always living on the edge of the latest upstream code, the Fedora Engineering and Steering Committee is taking additional time to decide whether to have 256 color terminal support by default in Fedora 18...

http://www.phoronix.com/vr.php?view=MTEyNjU

[89c51]

this http://ethanschoonover.com/solarized looks cool


sadly DE people seem to not care much about beauty

[uid313]

Does Linux support VT525?

[jvillain]

Just took it for a spin on my machine. No issues. Bring it on.

[soupbowl]

I'd like to see this on all *nix's.

[Nevertime]

this http://ethanschoonover.com/solarized looks cool


sadly DE people seem to not care much about beauty

That's convincing.. I'd much rather have 16 well chosen colours than 256 ugly ones.

[uid313]

The Linux terminal (i.e. those on virtual consoles) doesn't support 256 colors and will break if applications send 256 color codes to it.

Can this be fixed?

[signals]

The Linux terminal (i.e. those on virtual consoles) doesn't support 256 colors and will break if applications send 256 color codes to it.

Can this be fixed?

Not with the kernel's VT implementation, but if you are running a framebuffer console you can run fbterm which I believe supports 256 colors when TERM=fbterm.

[uid313]

Not with the kernel's VT implementation, but if you are running a framebuffer console you can run fbterm which I believe supports 256 colors when TERM=fbterm.

Why cant or doesn't it get fixed in the kernel's VT implementation?
Is the kernel's VT implementation V220 or VT525 compliant or what is it?

Why doesn't any distribution ship fbterm by default?

What is the difference between fbterm and kmscon?

[signals]

Why cant or doesn't it get fixed in the kernel's VT implementation?
Is the kernel's VT implementation V220 or VT525 compliant or what is it?

Well, I can only speak to what I've read on the Internet, but it seems that it would require a pretty serious re-write of the VT code to accomplish this. 8 (or is it 16?) colors is fairly fundamental to the design of the code, and it's not a high priority for the kernel devs, so the work just hasn't been done.

Why doesn't any distribution ship fbterm by default?

It's in Gentoo's portage, and I'm pretty sure that it is in Fedora's repos. It's probably in many of the others' repos, too. I'm sure it isn't installed by default because 99.9% of all users don't really care about the text consoles. (I'm in the 0.1% too.) I also think you have to login through a getty on a normal VT and start fbterm as a normal user. You can't have fbterm running the getty so it can't be integrated the way most distros would like. Although, I could be wrong about that; I'm no expert.

What is the difference between fbterm and kmscon?

As I understand it (someone correct me if I'm mistaken) kmscon is a work-in-progress to replace the kernel's VT code with something that uses kernel mode setting to manage the display hardware. In its current state, it doesn't actually do any terminal emulation, but they're working on it. fbterm is a user-space program that draws to the framebuffer and is already a fairly complete terminal emulator.