Subject: Re: kern/30064: wsdisplay does not allow white background
To: None <kern-bug-people@netbsd.org, gnats-admin@netbsd.org,>
From: John Darrow <John.P.Darrow@wheaton.edu>
List: netbsd-bugs
Date: 04/29/2005 06:32:01
The following reply was made to PR kern/30064; it has been noted by GNATS.

From: John Darrow <John.P.Darrow@wheaton.edu>
To: martin@duskware.de
Cc: gnats-bugs@netbsd.org
Subject: Re: kern/30064: wsdisplay does not allow white background
Date: Fri, 29 Apr 2005 01:31:27 -0500 (CDT)

 Martin Husemann <martin@duskware.de> wrote:
 >You can (ignoring raspops.c bugs for the moment) specify kernel and userland
 >text colors used by wsdisplay. I used
 >
 > WS_DEFAULT_BG=WSCOL_WHITE
 >
 >to get a white background. I get a gray background. I've been told the white
 >I'm looking for is bright white, but there is no way to define that in a
 >kernel config file as default.
 >
 >Stupid i386 people broke wsdisplay but added blinking border colors ;-)
 >
 >I just want a nice Sun style console, real white, with black text.
 
 This may be completely irrelevant to Sun hardware, but I thought I'd
 offer it as a guess: have you tried WS_KERNEL_COLATTR=WSATTR_BLINK ?
 
 I know it seems strange, but (remembering back to my DOS days) at least
 on PC hardware, text mode was done as an alternating array of character
 and attribute bytes, with the attribute byte consisting of color bits
 xRGBirgb, where r, g, b, and i were foreground red, green, blue, and
 intensity (HILIT) bits, and RGB were background red, green and blue
 bits.
 
 The high bit, x, was special: depending on a setting in the PC display
 driver, it could either be foreground blink, or background intensity.
 
 (I still have a 13 byte .COM file (set a few registers, call INT 10,
 exit) that would set it to act as background intensity, since having
 characters on the screen blink annoyed me.)
 
 jdarrow
 
 -- 
 John Darrow - Senior Technical Specialist
 Computing Services, Wheaton College, Wheaton, IL 60187
 Email: John.P.Darrow@wheaton.edu (plain text please, no HTML or proprietary)
 Neither spammers nor cold-callers will ever get my business, so don't bother.