# latest code (HEAD) => no console colours



## mgp (Jan 8, 2009)

Hi,
I'm tracking CURRENT and I updated the code 2 days ago...and I saw that the console colours are gone...
I have this in rc.conf:

```
allscreens_flags="green black"
```
which means green letters on black background
but when I restarted to load the new kernel the console colours didn't switch

```
# vidcontrol show
```
the output is white on black...

does anyone else have this problem ?

P.S.

```
$ uname -a
FreeBSD mydomain.org 8.0-CURRENT FreeBSD 8.0-CURRENT #2: Tue Jan  6 22:39:25 EET 2009     root@mydomain.org:/usr/obj/usr/src/sys/Ss-CURRENT  amd64
```


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## Maledictus (Jan 8, 2009)

I think you should contact ed@


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## danger@ (Jan 8, 2009)

I have already pinged him, he said he will reply soon.


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## ed@ (Jan 8, 2009)

Hello mgp,

Thanks for reporting the issue. I'll explain what I've changed to syscons a week ago:

Some time ago I started hacking on a replacement terminal emulator for syscons, which means it supports more VT100-like features like scrolling regions, etc. The advantage is that you can now SSH to your Cisco switch, etc. without getting rendering artifacts. Unfortunately this is very hard to get right in one go, so I introduced some regressions, which can be categorized as follows:

(1) bugs in the terminal emulator itself
(2) bugs in the terminal emulator <-> syscons binding code

In this case it's clearly an issue of type (2). I'll look into it, hopefully this afternoon. Because I can easily test the bug myself, I'll just commit a fix to SVN and notify you folks here.


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## mgp (Jan 8, 2009)

ok ed@, cool 
you could send over a patch so I can test it before you commit ...if you like


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## ed@ (Jan 17, 2009)

Hello,

First of all, sorry for my late response. I've been ill a couple of days the last week and, as usual, other things got in between.

I'll commit a fix in a minute. It makes the foreground/background color setting work again. I thought it was related to the syscons <-> teken binding code, but it turns out syscons implements setting default colors through escape sequences, while I thought it was done using ioctl()'s.

Thanks for reporting the issue.


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## mgp (Jan 18, 2009)

Hi ed@,
thank you for the fix, I've just tested it and it's working
however I noticed a problem...
I set colours in rc.conf so after the boot process is finished my console settings are on...all seems fine until I do

```
$ vidcontrol show
```
it shows the available colours and then my console colour settings are reset back to white on black
could you take a look at that ?
thanks


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## mgp (Jan 18, 2009)

by the way, how do I inform/contact FreeBSD developers regarding such stuff ?
I mean what's the preferred way...direct e-mail, via mailing list, ... ?


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## danger@ (Jan 18, 2009)

The most preferred way is currently to send an email to freebsd-current@FreeBSD.org.


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## ed@ (Jan 18, 2009)

Oh, it seems I didn't implement an ioctl() correctly. Ugh. I'll take a look at it soonish. There are some other small things I have to fix in syscons/teken. I forgot to look at this thread after my previous message. I'll see if I can subscribe to this thread.


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