[BBLISA] EL7 / CentOS - Alternative to fbterm or a way to get /dev/fb0 back?

[Nick Cammorato]

Hi everybody!

Firing this one off in as many places as I can :)

I'm trying to appliance-ify a CentOS 7 VM. This looks like it may be a
lost art as boxgrinder is dead and no one has talked about virtual
appliances in years as best I can tell. Anyway, the first challenge
there is to just spawn a control console on tty1, which systemd
actually makes somehow easier.

So that's done. I can spawn a program on tty1, I can even do all kinds
of cool things with selinux contexts, environment, users, etc. One
problem though, 16 color terminal. I really want at least 256 colors,
you know, for the marketing dept. #hudsuckerproxy

The "classic" way I think of of fixing that is to wrap whatever in
fbterm. Which isn't available anymore, but no big, it compiles,
packages and installs cleanly. It won't run, of course, because
there's no /dev/fb0 and there also doesn't appear to be any modules
you can load which will create it. Well, scratch that, the centos-xen
repo contains kernels that have the vga16fb module compiled in which
will create /dev/fb0, but that's a useless /dev/fb0 that only supports
16 colors. There might be a way to load vmwgfx or some such in a way
that creates it, but I haven't found that yet.

Oh, and of course all of this is complicated by the fact that I'm
trying to hit all of VirtualBox, Fusion, Workstation and ESXi - each
of which seem to have subtly different display adapters. Which might
be a future problem... except it all works fine in EL6/CentOS6.

So basically I'm now deep into a cavern and there's a yak here. Does
anyone know how to shave it / how you are supposed to do this today?

Cheers,
--Nick