There is a kernel with a highly experimental new console in it online for
people to play with. I don't expect the new console to be part of the upcoming
release so its testing is completely separate (testers note: the new Xarm may
work with it after a fashion).

The kernel can be downloaded from ftp://monet.me.ic.ac.uk/pub/vide/vide-990.gz

It has basic support for virtual consoles, most of an xterm termcap (missing
bold, underline and flash) and a scrollback buffer. It has no support for DRAM,
mouse, any released Xarm and it doesn't have any easy way of switching screen
mode. it is using the old keyboard driver which means that there are no
features of the new one present. It also uses the top few lines of the screen
for debugging info. This all looks a bit messy but I want to get the basic
functionality working before I tidy up all the debugging info. Oh yes, the
console is also slow (all the rendering is currently done a character at a time
in C).

To use it you must add devices to /dev called ttyg? where major=45, minor=?.
You should then add entries for ttyg0, etc to /etc/ttys with the type RPC and
the termcap xterm.

The white bar on the right-hand side is a primitive scrollbar (scroll with
alt+cursor keys).

It is possible to pass a mode through from the bootloader in the form
vidc.mode=a,b,c,d,.... where a, b, c, d, .... are numbers from a mode entry
from a monitor definition file. The newest bootloaders have a way to do this
easily but I don't know how Mark has configured them by default so you will
have to fiddle.

The main reason for letting people have the console at this time is to get the
xterm emulation sorted out. The most use of the console features I make is joe,
vi and more. If anyone has any pet program which they need to work please test
it and let me know any problems. If anyone needs 4014 emulation then please let
me know where I can get documentation of the escape codes from.

One final thing: the coloured splotch is the mouse pointer :-)

Cheers

Rob