21 Jul
2008
21 Jul
'08
10:51 p.m.
I pulled out my ADM-3A today in an effort to stave off studying and
homework and such; hooked it up to my Debian box, only to find that
there isn't really very good support for it under Debian. I use this
line in my inittab:
T0:23:respawn:/sbin/getty -h -L ttyS0 9600 adm3a
and while I can log in, vim for example looks TERRIBLE, ls tries to do
color and fails miserably, etc.
When I log on to one of the Solaris machines on campus via SSH, they
handle things gracefully. ls works right, vi is excellent.
Is the difference in our terminfo files, or what? I'm not really sure
how these things work so I'm hoping somebody can help me figure out
what's up here, because I'd like my Debian computer to play nicely
with the terminal.
Thanks
John
--
Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Cthulhu R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn
22 Jul
22 Jul
7:59 a.m.
John Floren schreef:
I pulled out my ADM-3A today in an effort to stave off
studying and
homework and such; hooked it up to my Debian box, only to find that
there isn't really very good support for it under Debian. I use this
line in my inittab:
T0:23:respawn:/sbin/getty -h -L ttyS0 9600 adm3a
and while I can log in, vim for example looks TERRIBLE, ls tries to do
color and fails miserably, etc.
When I log on to one of the Solaris machines on campus via SSH, they
handle things gracefully. ls works right, vi is excellent.
Is the difference in our terminfo files, or what? I'm not really sure
how these things work so I'm hoping somebody can help me figure out
what's up here, because I'd like my Debian computer to play nicely
with the terminal.
I'm no expert on this topic, but I think you need to adapt the TERM
environment variable. The curses library uses this to determine what
control codes to send to your terminal to draw the screen.
Regards,
bert
9:05 a.m.
On Tue, Jul 22, 2008 at 7:59 AM, Bert Thomas <bert at brothom.nl> wrote:
John Floren schreef:
But adapt it to what? "adm3a" doesn't seem to help.
John
--
Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Cthulhu R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn
I pulled out my ADM-3A today in an effort to stave off studying and
homework and such; hooked it up to my Debian box, only to find that
there isn't really very good support for it under Debian. I use this
line in my inittab:
T0:23:respawn:/sbin/getty -h -L ttyS0 9600 adm3a
and while I can log in, vim for example looks TERRIBLE, ls tries to do
color and fails miserably, etc.
When I log on to one of the Solaris machines on campus via SSH, they
handle things gracefully. ls works right, vi is excellent.
Is the difference in our terminfo files, or what? I'm not really sure
how these things work so I'm hoping somebody can help me figure out
what's up here, because I'd like my Debian computer to play nicely
with the terminal.
I'm no expert on this topic, but I think you need to adapt the TERM
environment variable. The curses library uses this to determine what control
codes to send to your terminal to draw the screen.
Regards,
bert
10:04 a.m.
Bert Thomas wrote:
John Floren schreef:
No, the TERM variable just tells the system which TERMCAP/TERMINFO entry
to use. You still need a proper TERMCAP or TERMINFO entry for the
terminal you're using.
Peace... Sridhar
I pulled out my ADM-3A today in an effort to
stave off studying and
homework and such; hooked it up to my Debian box, only to find that
there isn't really very good support for it under Debian. I use this
line in my inittab:
T0:23:respawn:/sbin/getty -h -L ttyS0 9600 adm3a
and while I can log in, vim for example looks TERRIBLE, ls tries to do
color and fails miserably, etc.
When I log on to one of the Solaris machines on campus via SSH, they
handle things gracefully. ls works right, vi is excellent.
Is the difference in our terminfo files, or what? I'm not really sure
how these things work so I'm hoping somebody can help me figure out
what's up here, because I'd like my Debian computer to play nicely
with the terminal.
I'm no expert on this topic, but I think you need to adapt the TERM
environment variable. The curses library uses this to determine what
control codes to send to your terminal to draw the screen. 
10:38 a.m.
Bert Thomas schrieb:
John Floren schreef:
Actually, he sets the
TERM variable; that's what the 'adm3a' in the
getty line above is supposed to do.
This will then by exported to the login shell.
I rather think the problem is that contemporary linux versions attempt
to be clever, in running additional /etc/profile or /etc/login.csh etc.
files which nowadays no longer have any clue that one might connect
through a rather dumb terminal. I have seen such profile files that
simple replace whatever setting there is with its own idea (TERM=linux,
TERM=ansi) or alike, without any further check. Knowledge about former
best practices have largely degraded with modern Linux use - who the
heck will run anything below KDE on 1920x1600 in 4M-color modes anyway? ;-(
The advice is correct: check what TERM, LANG, LC_* etc. will tell you,
and be sure that it will fall back to 7 bit ASCII modes (not UTF). I
have also seen some "color ls" which implicitly assumes ANSI colors
without checking the terminal.
Yet, even with this, it has been an eternal problem that
termcap/terminfo settings were and are grossly buggy and untested; so
depending on the terminal settings and the used curses/ncurses version,
the few codes for an adm3a may no longer be sufficient to display even a
modest vi correctly, leave alone such great implementations (not!) of
text windowing software which imply PC line drawing characters >0x80
(it might already be ncurses that is the culprit).
--
Holger
I pulled out my ADM-3A today in an effort to
stave off studying and
homework and such; hooked it up to my Debian box, only to find that
there isn't really very good support for it under Debian. I use this
line in my inittab:
T0:23:respawn:/sbin/getty -h -L ttyS0 9600 adm3a
and while I can log in, vim for example looks TERRIBLE, ls tries to do
color and fails miserably, etc.
When I log on to one of the Solaris machines on campus via SSH, they
handle things gracefully. ls works right, vi is excellent.
Is the difference in our terminfo files, or what? I'm not really sure
how these things work so I'm hoping somebody can help me figure out
what's up here, because I'd like my Debian computer to play nicely
with the terminal.
I'm no expert on this topic, but I think you need to adapt the TERM
environment variable. The curses library uses this to determine what
control codes to send to your terminal to draw the screen. 
9:53 a.m.
"John Floren" <slawmaster at gmail.com> writes:
Is the difference in our terminfo files, or what?
Probably. There aren't a lot of Debian users who need a terminfo entry
for an ADM3A these days, so only the most commonly used terminal
definitions are installed by default. To get the rest of them
(including adm3a and variants), install the "ncurses-term" package.
--
Adam Sampson <ats at offog.org> <http://offog.org/>
10:23 a.m.
On Tue, Jul 22, 2008 at 9:53 AM, Adam Sampson <ats at offog.org> wrote:
"John Floren" <slawmaster at
gmail.com> writes:
Thank you Adam, that seems to have done the trick!
John
--
Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Cthulhu R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn
Is the difference in our terminfo files, or what?
Probably. There aren't a lot of Debian users who need a terminfo entry
for an ADM3A these days, so only the most commonly used terminal
definitions are installed by default. To get the rest of them
(including adm3a and variants), install the "ncurses-term" package.
--
Adam Sampson <ats at offog.org> <http://offog.org/>
23 Jul
23 Jul
7:31 p.m.
On Mon, Jul 21, 2008 at 10:51 PM, John Floren <slawmaster at gmail.com> wrote:
I pulled out my ADM-3A today in an effort to stave off
studying and
homework and such; hooked it up to my Debian box, only to find that
there isn't really very good support for it under Debian. I use this
line in my inittab:
T0:23:respawn:/sbin/getty -h -L ttyS0 9600 adm3a
and while I can log in, vim for example looks TERRIBLE, ls tries to do
color and fails miserably, etc.
When I log on to one of the Solaris machines on campus via SSH, they
handle things gracefully. ls works right, vi is excellent.
Is the difference in our terminfo files, or what? I'm not really sure
how these things work so I'm hoping somebody can help me figure out
what's up here, because I'd like my Debian computer to play nicely
with the terminal.
Thanks
John
Ok, one more thing.
When I turn on the terminal, I don't get a login prompt, just the
cursor in the upper left. I hit enter and break a bunch of times but
don't get anything. If I unplug the serial cable and reconnect it,
however, I'll suddenly get all the login prompts that I should have
seen from hitting enter all those times.
Here's what I've got in my inittab:
T0:23:respawn:/sbin/getty -h -L ttyS0 9600 adm3a
Anybody know what's going on here? I seem to remember it working fine
hooked up to my Debian laptop...
John
--
Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Cthulhu R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn
5843
days inactive
5844
days old
7 comments
5 participants
participants (5)
-
ats＠offog.org -
bert＠brothom.nl -
holger.veit＠iais.fraunhofer.de -
ploopster＠gmail.com -
slawmaster＠gmail.com