[plug] ls in colour & terminal size

[Craig Ringer]

David White wrote:
> Is there a way to this with out a kernel hack? I still don't know how 
> and don't really want to try. But if I hadto I would. I have an S3Virge 
> DX (yes I know that it not good)

OK, you'll need either VESAFB support or card-specific framebuffer 
support to get a "bigger" console. This is not negotiable :-/ unless you 
consider setting a smaller VGA font to be good enough.

There is no card-specific support available for S3 cards to my 
knowledge, so you'll be using VESA. This has downsides - its _really_ 
slow (compared to VGA mode), and can cause nastiness with switches to 
and from X, plus with some cards and biosen it just won't work right.

Your kernel may have vesafb support already. I've emailed you (directly) 
a copy of the vesafb docs from the kernel tarball. Read it, try what it 
says manually on the boot command line (lilo) or ?? (someone using GRUB 
please explain how to set vga=nnnn for GRUB) and see what happens. If 
you get nowhere, its likely your kernel doesn't support VESAFB. Maybe 
"dmesg | grep -i vesa" will tell you, or alternately grep your kernel 
config file (if you have it) for VESA.

Anybody know a better way to check for vesafb support in the kernel when 
you don't have the .config on you?

If the kernel doesn't have vesafb support, you'll just have to enable it 
or give up and go to using big xterms. There are two ways of doing this 
- method #1 is use your distro's kernel source tarball and just change 
the config to meet your needs; method 2 is use the "vanilla" kernel.I 
honestly don't know which is easier, having only used method 2 - but 
method 1 will confuse your distro a lot less. With debian just apt-get 
install kernel-source-2.n.nn; red hat / mandrake get the SRPM. Beyond 
that somebody else will need to help you out, I haven't been using the 
default debian kernels for some time.

Method 2: Get the kernel tarball from a local mirror 
(ftp.iinet.net.au/pub/kernel is a good choice for many here). Untar it 
and build it. If you don't know how - read the relevent HOWTO on 
linuxdoc.org. To configure VESAFB suppor in "make menuconfig", choose 
"console drivers" then "frame buffer support", enable it, and then 
enable "VESA VGA graphics console". I just checked, there is _no_ card 
specific support for S3 unless (maybe) its available as a patch to the 
kernel sources. Build and install it, then re-read the vesafb docs file 
and try again.

I'm probably sounding a bit sharp here - its not intended, I'm just 
trying to get you the info and direct you to what you need to know. I 
won't write it out on the list whem there are better sources of info 
(linuxdoc.org) out there.

If you don't have any success then, yell and I or someone else on list 
will see what can be done to help out.