Newsgroups: comp.os.minix
Subject: How to make it blue ?
Organization: Syracuse University, Syracuse
From: mcconnel@hydra.syr.edu (Terry R. McConnell)
NNTP-Posting-Host: hydra.syr.edu
Message-ID: <36caccdb.0@news.syr.edu>
Date: 17 Feb 1999 09:06:19 -0500
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I like my terminals to have a blue background. I find this more restful on
the eyes than the default stark black ( or maybe I'm just more used to blue
screens from having spent too much time programming under Windows :-)

The problem is how to set things up so that I always and everywhere have a
blue background while running minix ? Linux has the command 
setterm -background blue
which does the trick just fine, but Minix appears to have no analogous
command.

I've taken the following steps so far:

1) I begin my /etc/motd with the Ansi escape sequence ^[[44m (change background
color to blue.) 

2) I embed the magic escape sequence in my shell prompts. 

Unfortunately, many applications, notably vi and more, seem to begin by
resetting the terminal background to the default. Now, I suppose I could look
for the magic incantation to put in every application's .startup file, but
is there a better way? Would it work, e.g., to include ^[[44m in the 
clear screen capability in termcap? Or would that be a bad idea ?
Is there a simple way to change the default background without changing the
terminal driver code?

Interestingly, I don't recall having this problem with vi under 2.0.0. (Or
maybe memory fails me.)

-- 
************************************************************************
Terry R. McConnell   Mathematics/304B Carnegie/Syracuse, N.Y. 13244-1150
trmcconn@syr.edu                            http://barnyard.syr.edu/~tmc 
************************************************************************
