On 02/05/2013 01:05 PM, Paul Robert Marino wrote:
>> On Feb 4, 2013 3:18 PM, Stephen Isard <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
>>
>> Is anybody else out there trying to use lynx in SL6.3? When I bring it
>> up, the text for url links comes up as yellow on a white background, and
>> is pretty much invisible. This wasn't the case in SL5.5. I know how to
>> fix the problem for my own use, but lynx shouldn't come up unusable by
>> default. Before I try reporting it as a bug to the packagers, I want to
>> be sure it happens to other people too, and isn't due to some
>> idiosyncracy of my own setup. Anyone?
>
> Change your terminal settings.
> The background color is the default background color of your terminal.
>
> It sucks if you are on a default white background xterm but works well
> if you are on a black background terminal.
> that you are experiencing is a software color philosophy difference. I
> personally hate white backgrounds because they hurt my eyes over time
> but the default color coded scheme for the terminal is impossible to
> read with a black background. In addition every admin I've ever worked
> with and the hundreds of people I've talked with in user groups who
> don't run X11 on their servers hate it too. Do what every one else does
> change it to your liking and deploy the changes to all if your hosts.

The default Lynx color scheme is designed for a dark background. Since 
at least the mid 90's people have been complaining about that on the 
Lynx dev list. Those users are invariably users of an X-based window 
manager that has a windowed terminal program that defaults to a light 
background.

This idea has always been rejected. Making Lynx friendly to terminal 
emulators at the expense of breaking Lynx in its primary use case 
(runlevels 1-3) is unacceptable. In particular, system administrators 
trying to get X (or anything else) back up need Lynx to work correctly 
on a dark background, because that's all they've got to work with in 
many cases.

Setting the X terminal emulators to actually emulate the way real 
terminals work, on the other hand, sounds like a good idea (to me). I 
don't know anyone who leaves terminal programs with the default light 
background scheme, but maybe some do. Anyway, that can be considered a 
distro-level issue since a distro could decide to set their own defaults 
for Gnome Terminal and Kterm instead of just going along with the 
embedded X aversion to dark backgrounds. (In the early 80's "dark" meant 
"old fashioned", so it wasn't politically acceptable within that 
particular dev tribe. Today I don't think anyone cares.)