On Wed, 11 Feb 2026, Andy Smith wrote:
Hi,
The text dialog boxes that appear when you do dpkg-reconfigure <package
name, or when you are resolving a config file conflict on package
update: is it possible to change their colour scheme?
I think this is a great idea.
It's typically a blue screen background, a grey dialog background, black
text, a red selection bar…
I am wincing in pain. Literally hissing.
These days I actually find the accessibility mode high contrast colour
scheme as offered by the installer to be preferable so if I could use
that for all debconf dialogs I'd be happy.
ME TOO.
Starting from tomas's pointer to whiptail I did some poking around,
found an email discussing an ubuntu package cdebconf-newt-udeb
https://www.mail-archive.com/[email protected]/msg05033.html
that included a promising-sounding file:
/etc/newt/palette.dark
$ wget
https://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/pool/main/c/cdebconf/cdebconf-newt-udeb_0.251ubuntu1_amd64.udeb
$ dpkg-deb -x cdebconf-newt-udeb_0.251ubuntu1_amd64.udeb ./
I inspected ./etc/newt/palette.dark,
# mkdir /etc/newt/
copied ./etc/newt/palette.dark to /etc/newt/, changed its owner from
the downloading user to root:root, checked that its permissions were
sane
and then tested with
# NEWT_COLORS_FILE=/etc/newt/palette.dark dpkg-reconfigure locales
which looked satisfactory to me.
So I then did
# ln -Tv /etc/newt/palette.dark /etc/newt/palette
and verified that this had the desired effect with
# dpkg-reconfigure locales
And it did. I now have the dark theme by default.
