Baslinux mailing list

[baslinux AT lists.ibiblio.org]

On Sun, 22 Jul 2007, baslinux AT lists.ibiblio.org wrote:

> Hi, List, from: Czerno.
>
> Did I report that under the BL3 GUI, I live in (mostly) black & white
> ? Desktop background is, saddeningly, black. Is this by design, or
> due to my obligatory video settings in 16 colours (EGA-like) ? Is it
> possible to (re-)define the palette used by apps and the desktop
> itself so colours are applied and, where necessary, approximated
> (guess it's called dithering) ? After all my Windows 95 also runs in
> 4-bit coulour modes, yet it shows a multiplicity of colours,
> manipulating the HW palettes (it's VGA all the same, *not* CGA!) &
> dithering pictures when appropriate, I believe.


Windows uses a VGA driver for cards with 4-bit color.  I doubt that Xvesa 
was optimized for older video cards.  It is nearly unusable for 8-bit 
color.  Try the linux VGA X server (/slakware/x1/xvg16.tgz) instead of 
Xvesa, with Steven's no-xvesa.tgz.  It will take up 2-3MB but if it works 
you can delete Xvesa to compensate.

Why don't you change to a video card with 15-bit or more color?  8-bit 
will not work well.

> For instance, running Lynx in a virtual terminal window, it comes out
> as black text on white, not the colours that it gets in a terminal

You can set it to not use colors.
'o' for options, 'Show color OFF' instead of ON.
Save options to disk.
Does that help?  At least you won't get white on white.
I see inverted text instead of colored text now.

Or you can set lynx.lss to show the screen in your choice of colors.  I 
have it set up to work even on a TTL monitor (with actual bold for bold).
Linux mda (monochrome) driver is broken and does not show underlines 
except as bold.

> console using the same config file. As such Lynx is barely usable in
> the GUI, not that I want colours for the prettiness, but the various
> colours used by Lynx have a significance; some characters even seem
> to come out white on white, which is not too conspicuous !
>
> I have been making all sort of efforts to set up a usable BL3, but if
> I can't fix more or less this colour problem, not to speak of the
> national keyboard at least in the GUI, it'll remain little more than
> a souvenir from a trip to Unixland. Nice trip anyway, and thank you

http://www.faqs.org/docs/Linux-HOWTO/Keyboard-and-Console-HOWTO.html

You will need kbd.tgz (the relevant parts).  This comes with a huge 
collection of console fonts and keymaps.  In /usr/lib/kbd I have 1.4MB 
after deleting a few things.  Pick out the pieces you need, to save space. 
Write up a summary of what worked for the BL archives.

I presume you want one of the ./qwerty keymaps, which include bg br cz de 
dk emacs es fi gr hebrew hu is it jp la (Latin1 - French?) lt mk nl (Dutch 
and Flemish) no pl ru ru1-4, ru_win, se sk tr tralt trq ua uk us.

Unpackage kbd.tgz in /tmp and copy over the selected files to 
/usr/lib/kbd/keymaps/i386/qwerty and /usr/lib/kbd/consolefonts.

If console fonts do not map properly there is a way to fix that.

setfont iso05.5f6 -u /usr/lib/kbd/consulesfonts/u - worked for me for 
Cyrillic.

Something to do with unicode mapping which I do not understand but it 
worked.

I have not set up other keymappings.  Let us know what you learn.


You are asking lots of intelligent questions.
Sindi

> --
> Czerno