fbterm, installation and configuration hacks

fbterm-hacks.md

fbterm setup and config hacks

Installation and setup

Install fbterm via your favorite package manager

pacman -S fbterm

Next you will need to grant a little bit of root to the fbterm executable so that it can do some magic with keyboards.

setcap 'cap_sys_tty_config+ep' $(command -v fbterm)

Finally you will need to add your user to the video group so you can access the device frame buffer /dev/fb0

usermod -aG video USERNAME

Run at login hacks

Running fbterm at login is easy, setting your shell variables is surprisingly not. I find that it works best just appending values to your /etc/profile rather than a new script in /etc/profile.d/ but I will probably revisit this at a later date.

Add the code in profile to the end of /etc/profile it sets a flag so you can wrangle your $TERM variable later, executes fbterm for you and injects a few color codes so that everything will render properly.

Next add the code in shellrc to your shell configurations somewhere. It will help to auto-dectect and set your $TERM variable properly. If $TERM is wrong, your colors won't work.

&c.

After installing fbterm and changing those config files you can just use normal color escapes in your display variables.

Configuration of fbterm is handled by $HOME/.fbtermrc which you should get a default copy of.

profile

# hack for 256 color depth with fbterm

if [ "$TERM" = "linux" ]; then
    echo -en "\e]P0222222" #black
    echo -en "\e]P8222222" #darkgrey
    echo -en "\e]P1803232" #darkred
    echo -en "\e]P9982b2b" #red
    echo -en "\e]P25b762f" #darkgreen
    echo -en "\e]PA89b83f" #green
    echo -en "\e]P3aa9943" #brown
    echo -en "\e]PBefef60" #yellow
    echo -en "\e]P4324c80" #darkblue
    echo -en "\e]PC2b4f98" #blue
    echo -en "\e]P5706c9a" #darkmagenta
    echo -en "\e]PD826ab1" #magenta
    echo -en "\e]P692b19e" #darkcyan
    echo -en "\e]PEa1cdcd" #cyan
    echo -en "\e]P7ffffff" #lightgrey
    echo -en "\e]PFdedede" #white

    FBTERM=1 exec fbterm
fi

shellrc

#!/usr/bin/sh 


case "$TERM" in
    xterm*)
        if [ -e /usr/share/terminfo/x/xterm-256color ]; then
            export TERM=xterm-256color
        elif [ -e /usr/share/terminfo/x/xterm-color ]; then
            export TERM=xterm-color;
        else
            export TERM=xterm
        fi
        ;;
    linux)
        [ -n "$FBTERM" ] && export TERM=fbterm
        ;;
esac

@nvillar no, not yet.

Interesting, I am thinking of installing fbterm on the rpi myself, since I do not want to mess up my laptop install. I hope a workaround will be found soon.

I wonder now if the problem is a broken linkage between fbterm and the input-method program.