[BRLTTY] Broken colour names

[Samuel Thibault]

Aura Kelloniemi, on Tue 17 Nov 2015 14:58:22 +0200, wrote:
> Samuel Thibault <samuel.thibault at ens-lyon.org> writes:
>  > Samuel Thibault, on Tue 17 Nov 2015 10:07:37 +0100, wrote:
> >> Aura Kelloniemi, on Tue 17 Nov 2015 10:23:33 +0200, wrote:
> >> > I could not get the blink attribute working on Linux console. Traditionally it
> >> > changed the background colour to be bright, as the bold attribute does for the
> >> > foreground colour.
> >> 
> >> The background color can not be made bright, only the foreground can
> >> (and only when loading a 256-glyph font, not 512-glyph). That's a
> >> hardware limitation in VGA boards.
> 
>  > Of course I should have checked what I was saying. As Dave says,
>  > foreground can always be made bright, but background can not, and it's
>  > the blink capability which is lost when loading more than 256 glyphs.
> 
> Yes, unfortunately it seems to be so. This is IMHO a stupid restriction during
> the modern times when people are using framebuffer consoles.

The problem is that new interfaces would have to be defined etc. But
nobody exists that has the time, motivation, and skill to do it. The
linux-console project is basically dead, and the VT support is about to
become deprecated, replaced by userland-driven terminals.

> Perhaps in the future we have a user-space console driver which does
> not have these problems, but now we don't have one, at least not a
> mainstream one.

There are plenty of them, yes, and probably the way to go.

> Or perhaps I should lobby BRLTTY folks to implement a screen driver for
> kmscon. (This is one of the reasons why I want to use an X terminal emulator.)

The problem is that these userland-driven terminals don't provide the
screen output. Ideally we'd manage to gather the people implementing
them, and get to define a common interface to access the screen output.

Samuel