Re: A question about Aptitude interactive mode
On 20140310_111135, Darac Marjal wrote:
> On Fri, Mar 07, 2014 at 01:48:03PM -0700, Paul E Condon wrote:
> > There is, new to me, a new feature in Aptitude. Some time in the past
> > within the past 18 months, I lost the ability to adjust the colors on
> > the text display. Now all I get is a white letters on a black
> > background. I get this in both gnome-terminal and in Xfce terminal.
> > Both terminal emulators are configured to display black letters on
> > white back. In both, when I type the command, aptitude, the screen
> > flips, apparently as part of aptitude initialization. Where is this
> > behavior configured? I want to change it.
>
> There doesn't appear to be anywhere to configure colours in aptitude (at
> least, not in the options), so it may be that ncurses is degrading the
> display due to your terminal type. AIUI, an application tells ncurses
> that it wants to draw a box here, or put some text there, or change to
> that colour background. Ncurses then converts that into command
> sequences appropriate to the terminal type (for example, if it's a
> 256color terminal, then all those colours are available, if it's 8color
> then the colour needs to be mapped to one of those available. Similarly
> some terminal support "clear to end of line", some support titles and so
> on).
>
> Check the value of $TERM (echo $TERM) and see if it looks sensible
> (there should be a matching file somewhere under /usr/share/terminfo. To
> try out another terminal type temporarily, you can do "TERM=xterm
> aptitude" to apply the change of variable to just the one command.
>
Thanks for the suggestion. I've done what I think you're suggesting
and have some questions. echo $TERM yields 'xterm' without the quotes.
When in look in /usr/share/terminfo, I don't find plain xterm. It only
comes with more characters after the 'm'. I don't know what to make of
this, since I've never before had to look into how the terminal
works. On reading my description of my problem I worry that I could
have given more information. So let me amplify a bit: Mostly I use
Xfce to create and manage the desktop. Mostly I use gnome-terminal as
my terminal emulator, but the problem about which I'm complaining
happens also when i try xfce4-terminal. When I decide to work with
Aptitude, I open a terminal window which comes up running Bash. With
Bash running the colors are correct, and I can tweaks them by editing
the Terminal Profile. While viewing Bash there is nothing unusual
about the performance. But when I type in the command: aptitude<CR>,
immediately after typing the CR, the screen changes white letters on
black background regardless of the settings in the terminal
profile. Furthermore, while Aptitude is running, I can open the
profile editing screen and see that the settings have not been changed
to white on black.
I know that there was a time when Aptitude used whatever profile I set
selected when Bash was running, but not anymore. I suppose I could
try, with you help, to put some configuration setting commands on the
command line just before the command 'aptitude'. But I have no idea
what to try. (that's the help from you). But I wonder. Is plain
'xterm' OK as a TERM value?
Also prefixing 'TERM=xterm' to aptitude had no effect. The Aptitude
screen still came up with white on black, and the profile editing
profile still claimed the profile was black on white. (And the fact
that you suggested this kind of indicates that 'xterm' by itself is
an OK value for TERM.)
I hope you have some more ideas.
Thanks.
PS. Actually, white on black is sort of just barely OK. The real
killer is the when I ask Aptitude to remove a package it 'hi-lites'
the package line to what seems to be black letters on a dark purple
background! It is only my faith that allows me to believe that there
is any lettering there.
--
Paul E Condon
pecondon@mesanetworks.net
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