console fg & bg colours

[Craig Sanders <cas%muffin@axolotl.pronet.com>]

I just spent most of yesterday backing up my slackware installation on my
main machine (muffin) and installing debian on it.  I've got it to the point
where most things are working as before, but will certainly have several
days of tweaking and merging of old configs into the new system before i'm
completely happy with it.

One thing that's really bugging me is that I can't get the console to have
a background colour...I'm not running X at the moment, and find that white
on black at 50 lines is almost impossible to read.

With my old Slackware, I used "setterm -background blue" (white on blue
is the readable contrast) to change the background colour. setterm isn't
included with debian.

I've currently got this sort of working by using a bash alias:

	alias blue=echo "^[[0;44m"

But that only lasts until a curses/ncurses application clears the
screen, at which point it resets the background back to black.

I suspect i'm going to have to hack the terminfo database to set the
colours.

any ideas on how to:

	set background colour to blue
	set foreground colour to low-intensity white
	set highlight colour to yellow
	set italics colour to cyan


Thanks for any help.


Apart from that, I'm quite pleased to finally move to debian on my home
machine - i've got a lot of work to do before the system's back to what i'd
consider a stable state but the effort will be worth it.

muffin's doing just as much work as it was doing before but seems a lot
more responsive, especially while working hard on numerous background
tasks (including news)


Craig

--
  cas@muffin.pronet.com                                cas@muffin.apana.org.au
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