Arch Linux

pixpop

Member

Registered: 2010-11-24

Posts: 4

How do I get more colors in the console?

I'm wanting to experiment with using emacs in the console ($TERM = linux) but it only has 8 colors, all of them ugly. Is there a way to have it provide more than 8 colors? (This will be without X, obviously).

tomk

Forum Fellow

From: Ireland

Registered: 2004-07-21

Posts: 9,839

Re: How do I get more colors in the console?

Courtesy of the Overlord himself:
http://phraktured.net/linux-console-colors.html

pixpop

Member

Registered: 2010-11-24

Posts: 4

Re: How do I get more colors in the console?

Thanks, I've already tried this.

It doesn't change the number of colors, it just changes what colors they are.

After I run this script, I see the colors on my screen change, but 'tput colors' still returns 8. And in emacs 'list-colors-display' still shows only 8 colors. Yes, they are a different 8 colors than before, but there are still only 8 of them.

Is there a way to get more than 8 colors on the screen at the same time?

bernarcher

Forum Fellow

From: Germany

Registered: 2009-02-17

Posts: 2,281

Re: How do I get more colors in the console?

As far as I understand the linux console is limited to 8 (resp. 16) colors by design. There is no easy way to change.

You may however try fbterm instead (it is in the AUR) which is a terminal implementation working on the frame buffer.

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pixpop

Member

Registered: 2010-11-24

Posts: 4

Re: How do I get more colors in the console?

Maybe it's because I'm new at Arch, but I was unable to get all the dependencies of fbterm to build.

I did have a Fedora install on another partition, so I used their regular package manager to install fbterm. It only has 8 colors as well.

I'm guessing that if I ever managed to get it installed correctly on Arch, I would find only 8 colors as well.

Looks like there's no way to do what I want at the moment.

bernarcher

Forum Fellow

From: Germany

Registered: 2009-02-17

Posts: 2,281

Re: How do I get more colors in the console?

Which version did you install? According to their homepage fbterm provides 256 colors since version 1.4.

How did you try to install? Installing fbterm-1.7.0-2 from the AUR using yaourt went flawlessly here. Dependencies are pretty standard (gcc-libs, libx86, fontconfig) so there should be no problem, really.

(I didn't run it, though.)

Last edited by bernarcher (2010-11-27 21:53:21)

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To know or not to know ...
... the questions remain forever.

pixpop

Member

Registered: 2010-11-24

Posts: 4

Re: How do I get more colors in the console?

Thanks for this. Using yaourt, I was able to successfully install fbterm.

However, although fbterm now claims to support 256 colors, emacs still shows only 8.

For reference, if I set TERM=xterm-256color, emacs will show all 256 colors, so I'm guessing this is a problem with the fbterm terminfo entry. I'll check with the fbterm maintainers.