On Mon, 16 Feb 2026, Andy Smith wrote:
Hi,
On Thu, Feb 12, 2026 at 03:48:10PM -0500, Davidson wrote:
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.
Strangely, on my Debian 13 hosts this isn't taking effect unless I
set NEWT_COLORS_FILE=/etc/newt/palette. On Debian 12 and below, just
putting the file at /etc/newt/palette seems to be enough.
I haven't yet worked out if this is some difference in how my Debian
13 hosts are configured, or a bug.
My experiments were performed on debian 12.
FWIW: From apt's logs it looks as though whiptail was installed, and
had been installed long before I began any investigation into the
topic. That is, the only hits for "whiptail" in apt/term.log* and
apt/history.log* look to me like they are from release upgrades,
despite root bash history containing a very recent attempt to install
whiptail manually, I imagine as part of this present investigation.
