Thilo.Manske@HEH.Uni-Oldenburg.DE said:
> > Also, how do you change the default text colour attribute? I'd prefer
> > the opposite of the default colours (ie. kernel white, normal green)
> > and
> > the GENERIC kernel config file shows how to change the kernel
> > attribute,
> > but not the default one.
> Hmm, I grepped over /sys/dev/wscons/* for
> "WSCOL", seems it's hardcoded into the source for me... 

As it looks now, the default attributes are determined
by the underlying display device driver. The reason is that
the machine or its firmware might have an idea about the appearance
of console output; in fact the alpha console prints everything
white-on-blue.
In practice, this doesn't work out that well. The vt100
terminal emulation layer eg sets the attribute to white-on-black
on ESC[m, which leads to screens with partly blue, partly black
background occasionally on alpha systems.
This is for a reason of course: An application using vt100
escape sequences doesn't know about a background imposed by
the system console or users like you - and if it did eg set the
foreground color to blue assuming blue-on-black, it would be
less usable on a screen with a blue background.
That's kind of a tradeoff between a terminal emulation which
tries to keep close to the original, and user preferences.

best regards
Matthias