Setting console session attributes in X terminals ?

[engelsman]

When you install Lunar, you start in a plain console session, with a black background, and an interactive shell with command completion using the TAB character.

However, once you get X installed, the default X terminal settings give a white background, against which the 'lin' colour scheme is particularly hard to read, the ncurses menu colours used by 'lservice' revert to white on black, and the command completion using the TAB character is not enabled.

In the short term I can hit Control-Mouse2 in the X terminal and select the 'Select Reverse Video' option to give me the black background, and I can run 'bash -i' to give the interactive shell and hence TAB command completion. I haven't yet worked out how to set the 'lservice' colours.

Where is the best place to set these options on a more permanent basis ?

[sofar]

The best way is either in the system-wide XTerm app-defaults file in /etc/X11/app-defaults/XTerm, or in the users local ~/.Xdefaults. Add the following lines (example) to get white on black, a bigger size, defualt loginshell enables and a bigger scroll buffer in xterms:

[engelsman]

Thanks for the information. It's been 10 years since I last needed to look into fiddling with these settings at work as the sysadmin always takes care of such things. But now I'm the sysadmin at home...

BTW: it appears that you need both
XTerm*scrollBar: true
XTerm*rightScrollBar: true

The one that had me stumped was the setting for the interactive shell. I could have sworn that I tried 'xterm -ls' (== XTerm*loginShell: true) when I installed the 1.5.1-rc1 ISO but I still couldn't get the command completion to work unsless I explicitly ran 'bash -i' within the window. I assumed that the login and interactive shell settings were two separate options. Now that I've installed the full 1.5.1 ISO it seems that the interactive setting is on by default. Talk about spooky