What's wrong with using an extra VC and just using the
existing {Alt}+{Fn} key (or assigning a new one with
loadkeys)?
Heck you can even write some dump little program (like
Conway's "Game of Life" (cellular automata) or the
Netware "Snake curses" (one of the screen blankers in
FreeBSD) -- or the old Norton Commander "Twinkling Stars"
(my favorite -- also a FreeBSD screen blanker option)).
You'd just run that on the "extra" (non-getty) VC.
I routinely configure my systems with 12 "getty" VC's
(all {Left+Alt}+{Fn} keys lead to getty's) and add
another 12 "open" ttyXX nodes in /dev/ (for use with
multiple X screens, and with the 'open' command or for
"tail -f" output). The last one ({Right+Alt}+{F12}) is
used by syslog -- which provides copies of all messages
there.
I also routinely replace Red Hat's obnoxious /etc/rc.d/rc.local
(which overwrites /etc/issue!) with a routine like:
## Begin -- set colors on VC's
for i in 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11; do
setterm -background blue -foreground cyan -bold on \
-store > /dev/tty$i
done
setterm -foreground red -bold on -store > /dev/tty12
setterm -foreground red -store > /dev/tty24
This gives the system a bright, cheery -- instead of the
dreary old "grey on grey" look you get from the default
MS-DOS and other Unix/Linux configurations.
What I want to know is:
When will we have hooks for VC screen blankers
(some way to invoke a user program at blank time)?
How would we implement a VC manager and menu system
like the old DESQview one? (including the best damn
interactive keyboard macroing and "mark and transfer"
system I've ever used).
When will we get decent scrollback buffers
(independent for each VC, with 'screen' like
copy and search)?
> Patch to kbd is relative to kbd-0.93.
>
> Pavel
>
> --- clean/drivers/char/keyboard.c Thu Aug 7 00:51:56 1997
> +++ linux/drivers/char/keyboard.c Thu Aug 7 01:11:39 1997
<...>
--
Jim Dennis (800) 938-4078 consulting@starshine.org
Proprietor, Starshine Technical Services: http://www.starshine.org
PGP 1024/2ABF03B1 Jim Dennis <jim@starshine.org>
Key fingerprint = 2524E3FEF0922A84 A27BDEDB38EBB95A