Re: Custom colors on Linux console

[Timothy Allen]

On Wed, 2019-01-30 at 21:39 -0600, Bryan Christ wrote:
> I guess my question is really this...  Is there a way to cause
> ncurses to ignore the obviously wrong / limiting information about
> pairs and colors if the TERM is set to "linux"?

The thing is, it's not obviously wrong.

Depending on what video hardware you have, and what drivers are built
into the kernel, it might be a classic VGA 80x25 8 dim + 8 bold colour
console, a 256 colour palettised frame buffer, a 24-bit direct-colour
frame buffer, or fully hardware-accelerated 3D. There's no way for a
single terminfo database entry to represent all those possibilities.

The documentation for the Linux console, console_codes(4), only
describes the capabilities listed in the "linux" terminfo entry. Note
that among other things, the ponysay source has a lot of mentions of
"KMS", or "kernel mode setting", the same API used by the X11 and
Wayland display servers. That stuff is *well* outside the range of what
terminfo is appropriate for.