Andy George wrote:
> Back in the good ol days of DOS, I remember being able to change text
> colours, using ANSI.SYS, and text screen sizes from 80*40 to 132*???
> 
> I can only assume that Linux can do a similar if not flasher trick.  How, or
> what MAN page would best show me how?
> 
> Andy "Sick of the Black and White screen" George
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Here's a great page detailing some of the ANSI sequences you can use in
creating fancier, coloured prompts for bash/xterm/whatever. Almost
identical syntax to DOS.

http://www-106.ibm.com/developerworks/library/l-tip-prompt/

Also worth checking out if you don't have it enabled by default is the
colouring of "ls", its one of the first things I edit in my .bashrc when
I have a new account anywhere, and also in /root/.bashrc when I install
a machine. Note however be careful if you're going to login remotely,
don't forget $TERM detection, some old telnet programs (eg. win98) don't
like the colours.

For the setting of different text screen sizes, the easiest way by far
is to pass options to your kernel on boot, or edit your lilo/grub
config. If you've got a copy of the kernel source, or the kernel-doc
packages installed if you're using a precompiled kernel check out
<kernelsource>/Documentation/svga.txt a simple way to start is just to
boot up and use vga=ask to get a menu from which you can test and select
various modes for bootup.


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