Re: Problems with bold colour display in text mode

[Jim Holland <mc mango zw>]

Hi again

On Tue, 22 Nov 2005, Leonard den Ottolander wrote:

> Date: Tue, 22 Nov 2005 22:29:16 +0100
> From: Leonard den Ottolander <leonard den ottolander nl>
> To: MC <mc gnome org>
> Subject: Re: Problems with bold colour display in text mode
>
> Hello Jim,
>
> On Tue, 2005-11-22 at 22:31 +0200, Jim Holland wrote:
> > Lack of bold colours is a problem that I have come across with a number of
> > recent Linux distributions, including RHEL clones, Fedora Core 4, etc.
>
> Please compare
> https://bugzilla.redhat.com/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=71958 . See if the
> solutions proposed in comments #5 and #6 solve your problem.

While the solutions mentioned do solve that particular problem on the 
local machine, there is also the related problem reported in the above:

     * Red Hat Linux now installs using UTF-8 (Unicode) locales by default.
       This has been known to cause various issues:
       7 Line drawing characters in applications such as make menuconfig 
       do not appear correctly in certain locales.

This problem does not appear when working on a local machine that is using
the recommended frame buffer solution, it does show up when using ssh to
connect from a machine running later versions of Red Hat/derivatives to a
remote machine using an older version of Red Hat.  Specifically, with
Midnight Commander, the display on the remote machine gets seriously
distorted because it does not refresh correctly.  This makes it completely
unusable.  Attempts to fix it with "setfont" or "consolechars"  do not
make any difference.  The only option I could find quickly was to run
Midnight Commander with the "-a" option to disable line drawing
characters.  That looks a little crude, but does give a usable display.

I must say that this is making me think of trying other distributions such 
as Debian that are apparently free of this issue.  How can Red Hat 
effectively abandon support for text-based applications like this?

Regards

Jim Holland
System Administrator
MANGO - Zimbabwe's non-profit e-mail service