How can I enable xterm 256 in ubuntu 8.04?

Question

How can xterm 256 be enabled in ubuntu 8.04? I was able to get that working in 9.10, but not 8.04.

Answer 1

It looks like Hardy (Ubuntu 8.04) doesn't provide the terminfo entry (/usr/share/terminfo/x/xterm-256color) in the default ncurses packages. Karmic provides this entry in the ncurses-base package (Karmic, Hardy), but Hardy provides it in the ncurses-term package (Hardy).

I found this article on enabling 256-Color Xterms in Ubuntu. To enable:

1. Install ncurses-term: sudo aptitude install ncurses-term

2. Customize the xterm entries; add this to ~/.Xdefaults:

   *customization: -color
   XTerm*termName: xterm-256color
   

3. Add this to ~/.xsession to apply to new terminals:

   if [ -f $HOME/.Xdefaults ]; then
      xrdb -merge $HOME/.Xdefaults
   fi
   

4. Log out and back in to pick up all changes, or just run xrdb -merge ~/.Xdefaults

5. Open a new xterm and test with tput and echo $TERM; you should see the following output:

   $ tput colors
   256
   $ echo $TERM
   xterm-256color
   

   If you do, you're good to go.

Additionally, some applications will need special configuration to take advantage of the new capabilities.

Answer 2

I found that simply placing this in either your .bash_profile or .profile (if the former doesn't exist) works for me:

export TERM="xterm-256color"

Then either open a new terminal session or source the profile file source ~/.bash_profile. I'm assuming you use bash, but this will probably work for most shell type dot files.