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

[Nick Cammorato]

Technically, no, it doesn't have to be a framebuffer. kbterm needs one
to work, but if given the choice between the 16 color limitation and
the overhead of X or even wayland - I'd live with 16 colors. Just from
a time management standpoint - a decent config TUI proto I can swing -
X I'd still be spinning up on in a month or doing something really
hackish with like spawning an xterm which launches the confconsole. :(

On Tue, Aug 9, 2016 at 6:04 PM, Matt Simmons <bandman at gmail.com> wrote:
> Does it NEED to be a framebuffer, or could you do a classic "startx" and run
> whatever program in a kiosk mode?
>
> On Tue, Aug 9, 2016 at 12:56 PM, Nick Cammorato <nick.cammorato at gmail.com>
> wrote:
>>
>> 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
>>
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