November 2004
Intermediate to advanced
736 pages
14h 4m
English
The Linux console normally imitates a serial terminal. By writing special character sequences to the console device, you control all aspects of the screen presentation. You will usually use S-Lang, curses, or some other screen-drawing library to draw to the screen; they use these escape sequences. The console can also be read and modified through an alternative full-screen interface, which is particularly useful for some specialized programs.
DOS programmers introduced for the first time to Linux programming often are dismayed to find that writing characters to the screen is not a simple matter of initializing a pointer to the address of the screen in memory and writing blindly through it. Some complain loudly about ...