What you say?
Yeah, I'm talking about coloring the 'linux console' - the little thing that you get when you login without X.
Most people I know use a framebuffer. That's due to the fact that non-framebuffered text is huge by default. Typically, you'll set vga=791 or something, and the text gets more readable, and it's left at that.
Yes, some people out there prefer bootsplash/gensplash/usplash/wtf-splash... I don't (though I do use grub-gfx from the AUR - grub with the background pixmap patch). However, when one boots into a framebuffer mode, you typically chose a color depth (personally, my laptop doesn't like anything over 16bit color, but that's good enough for me).
Ok, so I'm sure some people have asked "well, if I'm not using a splash screen, what use is all this color depth malarky?" - I'll show you. My ~/.bashrc contains the following lines:
if [ "$TERM" = "linux" ]; then
echo -en "\e]P0222222" #black
echo -en "\e]P8222222" #darkgrey
echo -en "\e]P1803232" #darkred
echo -en "\e]P9982b2b" #red
echo -en "\e]P25b762f" #darkgreen
echo -en "\e]PA89b83f" #green
echo -en "\e]P3aa9943" #brown
echo -en "\e]PBefef60" #yellow
echo -en "\e]P4324c80" #darkblue
echo -en "\e]PC2b4f98" #blue
echo -en "\e]P5706c9a" #darkmagenta
echo -en "\e]PD826ab1" #magenta
echo -en "\e]P692b19e" #darkcyan
echo -en "\e]PEa1cdcd" #cyan
echo -en "\e]P7ffffff" #lightgrey
echo -en "\e]PFdedede" #white
clear #for background artifacting
fi
Yeah, it's confusing, I know... however, these are console escapes specific to the linux console.
As with all escape codes, it begins with a little prefix indicating what the escape is actually doing: in this case "e]P", which is the "set color" escape. The format for the data is "XRRGGBB" where X is the number of the color to modify (in hex). This is a standard 16 color notation, which I have commented above. The colors above are taken verbatim from my ~/.Xdefaults file, with "color0" converted to "e]P0" and "color16" converted to "e]PF".
Note the last 'clear'. If you set these colors without clearing the terminal, the background color will change (assuming 'color0' changed) only for new text. You will get odd artifacting.
Here is a screenshot of my current, non-X setup, using the terminus consolefont (ter-112n) and the above colors.
Enjoy!