Colourful console in FreeBSD

I moved a few months ago. Moving from time to time is probably a Good Thing™. While going through my stuff, I came across a printout of this posting to the freebsd-stable mailling list back in 2007.

On a virtual machine running FreeBSD 8.2-STABLE and booting off a couple of ZFS mirrored root disks, I created the file /usr/src/sys/i386/conf/COLOURFUL and placed these lines in that file:

include GENERIC
ident COLOURFUL
options SC_HISTORY_SIZE=2000
options SC_NORM_ATTR=(FG_LIGHTGREEN|BG_BLACK)
options SC_NORM_REV_ATTR=(FG_YELLOW|BG_BLACK)
options SC_KERNEL_CONS_ATTR=(FG_LIGHTBLUE|BG_BLACK)
options SC_KERNEL_CONS_REV_ATTR=(FG_LIGHTRED|BG_BLACK)

Next, /etc/make.conf was changed to allow for the use of the COLOURFUL kernel instead of the GENERIC kernel:

KERNCONF=COLOURFUL

Here’s some snapshots showing the result after recompiling and installing world and the COLOURFUL kernel:

The first boot lines from a FreeBSD 8.2-STABLE kernel

Just to show what ZFS versions this VM was using at the time

Showing the difference between kernel console output and regular console output by userland

Booting completed

The first few lines of the man page for the ls command

If you use a command like vidcontrol VGA_80x25 in your ~/.bash_logout file, you’ll reset the colours on the particular vty to their default values, i.e. white on black.

# ~/.bash_logout at enterprise.ximalas.info.

tty | grep -q ttyv && ( vidcontrol VGA_80x25 && i=0; while [ "${i}" != "${TTYVHISTORYLINES}" ]; do echo; i=$[${i}+1]; done )
clear

# EOF of ~/.bash_logout.