Fedora Is Unsure About 256 Color Terminals

While Fedora releases tend to be ambitions on new Linux features and always living on the edge of the latest upstream code, the Fedora Engineering and Steering Committee is taking additional time to decide whether to have 256 color terminal support by default in Fedora 18.

The plan of this Fedora Project feature is to "Enable terminal programs to use the enhanced color capabilities of modern terminals by default." Basically to change the default color pallette from 8 to 256 colors.

Most command-line programs are already capable of taking advantage of 256 color terminals as do most xterms support this increased color range, but there's an artificial color limit of eight right now. Mac OS X 10.7 "Lion" has jumped to 32 times the color selection with xterm-256color.

The Fedora FESCo board members aren't against having an increased color range for the terminal, but they're just concerned about the implementation and the proposed profile.d implementation mentioned on the Wiki not working out, etc.

The FESCo members agreed to revisit the matter after having a 256 color terminal debate on the Fedora development mailing list.

Features that were approved for Fedora 18 during the Monday meeting was OpenStack "Folsom", targetd support as a remote "storage appliance" interface, and implementing libstoragemgmt as a library for a vendor-agnostic open-source storage API for SAN management.

The meeting notes are available on the devel mailing list. Other Fedora 18 features are mentioned in this Phoronix listing.

Fedora 18 is codenamed the Spherical Cow and should be released in November.