Hi Everyone!

I’ve been trying to rediscover the lost art of appliance-ification. SystemD is actually pretty amenable to masking tty1 and spawning a program instead of login which makes a config console a rather easy thing to do (mostly). Have that bit done, no problem. Happily spawning a rather locked down program.

However, you seem to be limited in terms of color palette, creating a new take on the classic how do you get a 256 color terminal on a tty problem (the related, how do you change the terminal resolution problem seems solved via boot param).

The old way(that I used) was to just wrap whatever in fbterm, but fbterm is missing. I can compile and package and install it no problem, but apparently there’s no longer a framebuffer for it to attach to – /dev/fb0 is gone – so it can’t actually run.

There doesn’t appear to be anything that would create /dev/fb0 either
– It looks like nothing was compiled into the default kernel. The vga16fb module is available if you install a xen kernel from CentOS-xen, but it’s 16 colors. vmwgfx doesn’t seem to make a framebuffer either, and it’s questionable if that’ll work across both virtualbox and vmware in any case.

An alternative would be to use xvfb or some such but that’s super overweight.

So, finally, a question – does anyone know how you solve this today?

Best,
–Nick Cammorato