Sysinstall colors

[Jeremy Chadwick]

On Mon, Oct 13, 2008 at 09:42:04PM +0200, borish at gmx.de wrote:
> After some trial and error, I put
>
> XTerm*color7:      #bebebe
>
> in my .Xdefaults. Now the yellow sysinstall font is much more legible  
> inside an xterm. This works for both xterm and rxvt. The rxvt man page  
> proved very useful.
>
> Now I have solved my problem but other users may experience the same  
> problem. Is it possible to modify sysinstall so that it uses a darker  
> background gray when run inside xterm?

I'm not sure this is desirable or recommendable.  There are some
terminal emulation programs -- specifically, PuTTY -- which emulate
TERM=xterm.  The RGB colours in PuTTY look just fine: quite legible.

The key problem here is this: there are no more darker grey backgrounds
available with the limited colour set available.  You get one grey bg --
sequence \e[47m; -- and that's it.  If you want other colours, you have
to have a 256-colour xterm compiled, which supports an extended palette,
and there's no way to detect if someone has such a capable terminal
(basing it on $TERM is not correct).

This is one of the limitations of (pardon my use of this term) ANSI
colour palettes.  Background colours are more limited than foreground.

> If not, we should add a note in the handbook.

An entry in the Handbook could be: "If the default colours chosen are
hard to read or make text illegible while using xterm or rxvt, please
see <some reference material> for how to adjust the RGB values for
grey and other colours".

Ideally, we should see about getting rid of the whole grey background
thing -- otherwise, stick with using black text with bright red letters
for the quick-jump menu keys.

-- 
| Jeremy Chadwick                                jdc at parodius.com |
| Parodius Networking                       http://www.parodius.com/ |
| UNIX Systems Administrator                  Mountain View, CA, USA |
| Making life hard for others since 1977.              PGP: 4BD6C0CB |