term support in ramdisk?

zb10948 · 05-05-2009, 09:24 AM

Hello,

i would like to do some nice ncurses layouts inside initrd regime. However, ncurses cannot initialize because there's no terminal support.

Basically, i just need to set x and y params of text output, background change and draw windows. Any nifty way i can do this without ncurses, while in initrd?

wje_lq · 05-06-2009, 10:44 PM

I haven't tried this, but you may wish to do two things:

Regardless of your desire for special effects, you may have to explicitly read and write to /dev/tty0. Or not. If your script is started so that it continues to run after initialization is complete (by starting it with "&" at the end of the invocation line), you may wish to pick /dev/tty1 or /dev/tty7 or elsewhat instead.
When you've resolved that issue, you can proceed to the special effects step. Again, I haven't tried this, but in your init script, try setting environment variable TERM to linux or vt100. You should be able to use ncurses after that.