Need help with colours on VGA console, Bell Tech SysV/386 R3.2

[Chris Robertson]

I posted this question a couple of weeks ago, but got no response.  Please
someone help me!  My local support people are, to put it bluntly, useless.

I have just got a VGA console for my Bell Technologies' SysV/386 3.2 Rel 2.1
Unix (it's on a Brand X 386).  The monitor seems to be working fine -- I
can get it to do pretty colours, but there are two problems:

	1.  No matter what I do, I cannot put the *whole screen* into some
	    background colour from the shell.  I end up with coloured
	    text at the left of the screen, black on the right-hand side.
	    Looks really repulsive.

	2.  I can't make the set of background colours which has to have
	    blink enabled first work.  All I get is blinking characters
	    and the other (non-blink) colour.  Annoying.

I have read the manuals (I *think* I've read all the relevant parts -- it's
a bit hard to tell without an overall index), and have mucked around with
terminfo entries, but to no avail.  I believe I saw the answer to my
question go by about two months ago, but that news is long expired here.

Surely there must be someone else out there with a similar system who has
solved this?  (Bell Technologies, or whatever you're called now, are you
on the net?)  All I want is to set windows of solid colour without having
to fill them with blanks first, and to have black-on-white for my working
shell environment.  I'm starting to get very frustrated about this.  Even
a (polite) RTFM with the proper sections pointed to would be welcomed.

-- 
mallow(3) - allocate discontinuous memory |    Chris Robertson
            and fill with white space     |  chris at mcc.pyrsyd.oz