Re: How many colors?

On Wed, 2007-09-12 at 18:56 -0400, cga2000 wrote:
> On Wed, Sep 12, 2007 at 03:58:35PM EDT, James Lehman wrote:

> 
> What I understand from Antonino's reply is that contrary to xterm and
> a couple other X terminal emulators, the linux console does not have
> the "physical" capability to display more than 16 colors.
> 

The main limitation of the linux console is that it is patterned from
VGA, each character is described in 16 bits only. At least 8-bits are
already assigned for the character map.  That leaves at most 8-bits for
the attributes, 4-bits for the background color and 4-bits for the
foreground color. With 4 bits apiece, you can only get 16 colors.

I haven't looked at xterm, but to preserve 16-bits/character, my guess
is that xterm set a fixed background color and assigned the full 8-bits
for the foreground color.

Tony


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