bright colors on linux-vt.

[uli_rgbg at gmx.de]

Hi,

I'd appreciate your help on the following problem:
I'm using a freshly installed FC5 on an x86_64. As I like the old 80x25 
textmode i usually run my vt's in this mode using vga=normal on the kernel 
append line.

Now, it's an old issue that -- while the vesa frambuffers (vga=0x317 or 
something) support all 16 colors of the vt100-alike linux-terminal -- fedora 
has only the 8 darker colors in the textmode (vga=normal).

Reading an old howto for redhat 8, I figured out that this is a font problem.
Fedoras default-font for the console seemed to sacrifice the bold-attribute to 
have better unicode-compatiblity. But this attribute seems to be used to start 
"bright mode". In the past releases i therefore simply 
used the font "lat9w-16" (/etc/sysconfig/i18n !) which had all the characters 
I needed. It also brought the bold attribute thus enabling me to use the 
otherwise missing bright colors.

With fc5 this oddly works only "partially":
After startup the system shows the expected behaviour: bright colors in 
textmode. But when I start X and then leave the X-Session by pressing 
CTRL+ALT+F<n>, the vt is in a very bad state: bright colors are gone (means 
identical with their non-brigth counterparts: e.g. yellow --> brown) and every 
colored letter appears in something like cyrillic letters. 

Typing "setfont lat9w-16" fixes the "cyrillic"-issue, but the bright colors 
do not reappear, even when loading the font several times.

Oddly, if a load some other font (not every font works, there are only a few. 
One of them is "Agafari-16") and then load lat9w-16 again, the bright colors 
do reappear.

Does anyone have an explanation for this? I'd mainly like to understand what's 
going on in my system. For example: Why does X change the font of my vt? Why 
does the order of loading fonts influence the result? What special voodoo is 
there about "agafari"-fonts...

Thanks for your help!